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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting To remove duplicates from pipe delimited file Post 302865765 by Don Cragun on Saturday 19th of October 2013 04:18:49 PM
Old 10-19-2013
This is a much harder problem that it appears at first glance.
The sort solution proposed by danmero should just give one line sort each set of lines with identical values in the 1st 2 fields, but the one printed depends on the sort order of the remaining fields. The order ginkrf requested was that the last line in the (unsorted) file be printed for each set of lines with identical values in the 1st two fields.

The awk solution proposed by mjf will print the 1st line of each matching set instead of the last line of each matching set. (And, if the 1st 2 fields when concatenated yield the same key even though the fields are different, some desired output lines may be skipped. For example if $1 is "ab" and $2 is "c" in one record and "a" and "bc" in another, they will both have key "abc".)

Since ginkrf didn't say whether the order of the lines in the output has to match the order in which they appeared in the input, I won't try to guess at an efficient way to do what has been requested. If the order is important, the input file could be reversed, fed through mfj's awk script (with !x[$1 $2]++ changed to !x[$1,$2]++), and then reverse the order of the output again. Depending on the output constraints this might or might not be grossly inefficient.

If the output order is not important, it could be done easily with an awk script, but could require almost 400mb of virtual address space to process 20 million 20 byte records.

With a better description of the input (is there anything in a record other than its position in the input that can be used to determine which of several lines with the 1st two fields matching should be printed) and the output constraints, we might be able to provide a better solution. Are there ever more than two lines with the same 1st two fields? If yes, out of the 20 million input records, how many output records do you expect to be produced? Are there likely to be lots of lines that only have one occurrence of the 1st two fields? What are the file sizes (input and output) in bytes (instead of records)? What is the longest input line in bytes?

What OS and hardware are you using? How much memory? How much swap space?

Last edited by Don Cragun; 10-20-2013 at 10:31 AM.. Reason: Fix explanation of the possible failure of mjf's awk proposal.
 

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PIPE(2) 							System Calls Manual							   PIPE(2)

NAME
pipe - create an interprocess communication channel SYNOPSIS
pipe(fildes) int fildes[2]; DESCRIPTION
The pipe system call creates an I/O mechanism called a pipe. The file descriptors returned can be used in read and write operations. When the pipe is written using the descriptor fildes[1] up to 4096 bytes of data are buffered before the writing process is suspended. A read using the descriptor fildes[0] will pick up the data. It is assumed that after the pipe has been set up, two (or more) cooperating processes (created by subsequent fork calls) will pass data through the pipe with read and write calls. The shell has a syntax to set up a linear array of processes connected by pipes. Read calls on an empty pipe (no buffered data) with only one end (all write file descriptors closed) returns an end-of-file. Pipes are really a special case of the socketpair(2) call and, in fact, are implemented as such in the system. A signal is generated if a write on a pipe with only one end is attempted. RETURN VALUE
The function value zero is returned if the pipe was created; -1 if an error occurred. ERRORS
The pipe call will fail if: [EMFILE] Too many descriptors are active. [ENFILE] The system file table is full. [EFAULT] The fildes buffer is in an invalid area of the process's address space. SEE ALSO
sh(1), read(2), write(2), fork(2), socketpair(2) BUGS
Should more than 4096 bytes be necessary in any pipe among a loop of processes, deadlock will occur. 4th Berkeley Distribution August 26, 1985 PIPE(2)
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