This is something we need to do from time to time: filter some useful information from a file (e.g., a log file) and count the instances of each "object". While filtering out the relevant information may be tricky and there is no general rule for it, counting the instances and sorting them is pretty simple.

Let's call "filter" the program, chain of pipes, or whatever you used to extract the information you are longing for. Then, the count and sort process is just a chain of three commands:

filter | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

The first sort is used to group equal instances together; then this is passed to uniq -c, which will "compress" each group to a single line, prefixed by the number of times that instance appeared in the output; then we feed all this to sort again, this time with -n (numeric sort) and -r (reverse sort, so that we have the most frequent instance listed first).

Nice, isn't it? 😉