Guys,

I have a file that is text, and comma delimited and is over 65536 lines. I want to run a grep command or awk or something that will look down the file and check the second column which is a specific date and just return the dates. Then I would like to have one date displayed for each no matter how many times it's in the file :-

e.g

4,070327,9,41,20,-1,-10,-250,001
4,070328,9,41,20,-1,-101,-800,001
4,070328,9,41,20,-1,-102,-800,001
7,070327,9,41,20,-1,-102,-800,001
7,070329,9,41,20,-1,-103,-800,001
4,070329,9,41,20,-1,-104,-800,001
7,070327,9,41,20,-1,-104,-800,001
4,070328,9,41,20,-1,-106,-800,001
7,070326,41,20,-1,-106,-800,001
4,070324,41,20,-1,-112,-800,001
4,070227,20,-1,-118,-400,001
4,070327,29,41,20,-1,-12,-200,001
4,070328,29,41,20,-1,-102,-800,001
7,070327,88,41,20,-1,-102,-800,001
7,070329,99,41,20,-1,-103,-800,001
4,070329,93,41,20,-1,-104,-800,001
7,070327,93,41,20,-1,-104,-800,001
4,070328,93,41,20,-1,-106,-800,001
7,070326,42,20,-1,-106,-800,001
4,070324,42,20,-1,-112,-800,001
4,070227,22,-1,-118,-400,001
4,070327,91,41,20,-1,-12,-200,001
etc...

So I would like to see 070227, 070326, 070327,070328, 070329 displayed like this :-

070227
070326
070327
070328
070329

Any help would be much appreciated.....

cheers....

Read the man page for grep

You can count how many times a pattern repeats with the -c flag, instead of displaying all lines that matches.

Be more specific in what do you want to find in your file.

You can extract the second field, sort it numerically and remove duplicates:

That works a treat....

Thanks for taking the time to help me, this will be very useful....

cheers....

can be simplified to

Good spot, I didn't know the u option of sort.

Thanks, nx5000.