How does the sort command handle duplicates?

The sort command handles duplicates based on the options you specify. By default, sort will include all lines in the output, even if they are duplicates. However, you can use the -u option to suppress duplicate lines, resulting in only unique lines being output.

Default Behavior

When you run the sort command without any options, it will sort all lines, including duplicates:

sort input_file.txt

Example Input:

apple
banana
apple
cherry
banana

Output:

apple
apple
banana
banana
cherry

Using the -u Option

If you want to remove duplicates and only display unique lines, you can use the -u option:

sort -u input_file.txt

Output:

apple
banana
cherry

Summary

• Without -u: All lines, including duplicates, are included in the output.
• With -u: Only unique lines are included in the output, and duplicates are suppressed.

This behavior is useful when you want to clean up data or analyze unique entries in a dataset.