How to write shell script that filter for lines and count them?

Question

I have a text file like this:

Apple
Orange
Orange
Banana
Banana
Orange
Banana
Orange
Apple
Orange

I want to produce the following output after running a bash shell script:

Apple: 2
Orange: 5
Banana: 3

It's pretty standard stuff if I use a full blown language like Java/C++ etc but what is the quickest way to do it with a shell script/command line?

Answer 1

sort filename | uniq -c | awk '{ print $2 ": " $1 }'

Answer 2

sort $FILE | uniq -c

will give you

2 Apple
3 Banana
5 Orange

Answer 3

uniq -c $FILE | perl -pe 's|[ ]*([0-9]+)[ ]*(.*)|\2: \1|'

This will format it to the way to specified. You can add '| sort' at the end the sort it too.

EDIT: As points out in the comment, I make a mistake about uniq so here is the corrected one.

sort $FILE | uniq -c | perl -pe 's|[ ]*([0-9]+)[ ]*(.*)|\2: \1|'

Sorry for the problem.

Answer 4

This solution uses only one tool: awk

$ awk '{count[$0]++} END {for (c in count) {print c ": " count[c]}} ' count.txt
Orange: 5
Banana: 3
Apple: 2