compare columns for equal values and output a summary

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all

I am trying to scan a file that has 3 columns:

red blue 123351
red blue 848655
red blue 126354
red blue 023158
black white 654896
red blue 650884

I want an output that sums the rows that have matching columns 1 and 2 :wall:

red blue has 5 entries
black white has 1 entry

Thanks

2

Can you show us what you have tried so far?

3

Hello

Well I am not clued up on the subject. So I first tried to get only the columns I am interested in

awk -F " " '{print $1 $2}' datafile > ouput

I am thinking to use a while loop that counts identical lines in the "output" file.

Thanks

Reno

---------- Post updated at 05:36 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:06 PM ----------

Ok, I think I managed to pipe it to uniq -c

this gives me a count of all unique entries but I noticed that if I have a file that looks like that:

red blue 123351
red blue 848655
red blue 126354
red blue 023158
black white 654896
red blue 650884

the output is

4 red blue
1 black white
1 red blue

somehow I d like to have

5 red blue
1 black white

I ll keep digging!

Reno
Thanks

Reno

4

Hi.

Suppose you sorted it first ... cheers, drl

5 
$ awk '{a[$1 FS $2]++}END{for (i in a) print a,i}' infile

5 red blue
1 black white
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