In these scripts... /usr/bin/awk '{print $7}' /home/logs/access_log.old | /usr/bin/sort | /usr/bin/uniq -c | /usr/bin/sort -r 1) If your PATH is well conf

In these scripts... /usr/bin/awk '{print $7}' /home/logs/access_log.old | /usr/bin/sort | /usr/bin/uniq -c | /usr/bin/sort -r 1) If your PATH is well configured, you can omit the path to the binaries (i.e.: "/usr/bin/sort" becomes just "sort") 2) Instead of using awk, you can just use cut. # Delimit this line by the space character # and get the 7th field cut -d " " -f 7 /home/logs/access_log.old 3) Then, there's this: # This is not correct (lexicographic sort) sort | uniq -c | sort -r # This is correct (sort numerically) sort | uniq -c | sort -rn Why? because otherwise you get 1, 10, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Try it yourself: seq 1 10 | sort # lexicographic sort seq 1 10 | sort -n # numeric sort 4) If you are just interested in the top 10, you can add sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10