What UNIX command can I use to get this output:

Smith 3
Jones 1
Arnold 2

from a file with these contents

Smith
Jones
Smith
Arnold
Smith
Arnold

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated...

Bill

for i in `cat fic|sort|uniq`
do
name=$i
number=`grep $i fic|wc -w`
echo "$name $number"
done

The following pipe :

sort input_file | uniq -c

gives :

2 Arnold
1 Jones
3 Smith

If you really want the counter in last position :

sort input_file | uniq -c | awk '{print $2,$1}'

gives

Arnold 2
Jones 1
Smith 3

If you want you can also do all the work with awk (i prefer sort|uniq) :

awk '
{ line[$0]++ }
END { for (l in line) print l,line[l] }
' input_file

Jean-Pierre.

I did not know "uniq -c"

think jp