>>To be more specific, I need to find how many distinct records are there in say column#1? awk '{print $1}' filename | sort -u | wc -l This will show how many unique entries are present in column one (use awk -F to change delimiter e.g awk -F ":" for : delimiter) >> How can I filter out the distinct records with number of occurances less than a pre-determined threshold? I don't quite understand this part. awk '{print $1}' filename | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn Will give you a number of occurrences (reverse numerically sorted) of uniq data from column one. Now I think you want to put that through a loop and only show those that are less than threshold? Thanks Sheraz ------Original Message------ From: sheraznaz at yahoo.com Sender: centos-bounces at centos.org To: CentOS mailing list ReplyTo: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Text file manipulation in CentOS? Sent: May 11, 2010 1:14 AM Can you sample input and expected result. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: hadi motamedi <motamedi24 at gmail.com> Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 09:09:23 To: CentOS mailing list<centos at centos.org> Subject: [CentOS] Text file manipulation in CentOS? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry