About

uniq stands for “unique” and filters out adjacent, duplicate lines in a file.

It's a filter progam that is part of the Gnu utility package

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Charactertistic

• adjacent means that uniq does not detect repeated lines that are not next to each other

You may want to sort the input first, or use 'sort -u' without 'uniq'.

• comparisons honor the rules specified by 'LC_COLLATE'.

Syntax

uniq [OPTION]... [INPUT [OUTPUT]]

With no options, matching lines are merged to the first occurrence.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
  -c, --count           prefix lines by the number of occurrences
  -d, --repeated        only print duplicate lines, one for each group
  -D                    print all duplicate lines
      --all-repeated[=METHOD]  like -D, but allow separating groups
                                 with an empty line;
                                 METHOD={none(default),prepend,separate}
  -f, --skip-fields=N   avoid comparing the first N fields
      --group[=METHOD]  show all items, separating groups with an empty line;
                          METHOD={separate(default),prepend,append,both}
  -i, --ignore-case     ignore differences in case when comparing
  -s, --skip-chars=N    avoid comparing the first N characters
  -u, --unique          only print unique lines
  -z, --zero-terminated     line delimiter is NUL, not newline
  -w, --check-chars=N   compare no more than N characters in lines
      --help     display this help and exit
      --version  output version information and exit

A field is a run of blanks (usually spaces and/or TABs), then non-blank characters. Fields are skipped before chars.