bash query.

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a $file which will be used as an input file for the script, pasting ie.

16              VDBDN084_K_TPVV016     SDBDN081 5:3:2   t  4313  273 4313  69077   3689  69077   2.0  2.1  16.0  13.5    5
 16              VDBDN084_K_TPVV016     SDBDN081 4:3:3   t  4313  273 4313  69890   3679  69890   1.3  1.6  16.2  13.5    6
 16              VDBDN084_K_TPVV016     SDBDN081 5:3:2   t  4097  182 4097  60396   2213  60396  2.0  2.1  14.7  12.2    5
 16              VDBDN084_K_TPVV016     SDBDN081 4:3:3   t  4097  182 4097  59092   2184  59092  1.4  1.8  14.4  12.0    9
 15              VDBDN084_K_TPVV015     SDBDN081 5:3:2   t  1082  626 1082  81584   7242  81584  5.6  3.9  75.4  11.6    0
 15              VDBDN084_K_TPVV015     SDBDN081 4:3:3   t  1081  626 1081  82663   7261  82663  4.3  3.8  76.4  11.6    7
 15              VDBDN084_K_TPVV015     SDBDN081 5:3:2   t  1002  634 1082 106008   9423 106008   5.7  3.9 105.8  14.9    2

initially I was counting duplicates on bases of second coulum and was using "sort $file |awk '{ print $2}'| uniq -c | sort -k1nr" in my script; but now there is a requirement and I have to count duplicate on basis of 2nd column and 4 column and also want to print the output of 2nd and 4th column.

2

Please use code tags for data input and code.

you can print in awk.

awk '{ print $2,$4}' $file | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1nr

From your above code it looks like you want unique values with respect to $2 and $4.

use this..
It will give you unique values..

awk '!X[$2,$4]++' $file
3

To also limit the output to two columns:

awk '{$0=$2 OFS $4}!A[$0]++' infile