3 ms·

Not only GNU sort, but also postgresql, mysql and many more... Please, "huge waste"? How do you sort something that does not fit in memory?

• justinsaccount 7y ago
  Are you being difficult on purpose? I posted a comment on how 'sort | uniq -c | sort -n' is an interesting and very capable pipeline, but often misused and slower than other alternatives. > you are comparing Yes, I am comparing two methods of accomplishing the same thing. That is how comparing things works. > Please, "huge waste"? How do you sort something that does not fit in memory? Note how the full sentence included "if you give it 100GB of 5 different strings". If your input is 100GB of 5 different strings, then the hash table will easily fit in memory, and sorting the entire data set only to pass it to 'uniq -c' is indeed a 'huge waste'. There are tons of large data sets that only have a small number of unique values in particular fields. protocols, ports, http status codes, hour of the day, etc. 'sort | uniq -c | sort -n' will work for all of them, but not nearly as efficient a hash table.
  • tuldia 7y ago
    > Are you being difficult on purpose? Programming is about paying the bare minimum attention to the details. > [...] two methods of accomplishing the same thing [...] Absolutelly not. one prints: 72000000 hello 72000000 world the other hello 72000000 world 72000000 Now try both examples against a file with more than one column to understand what I'm talking about ;)