Hi,

I've a flat file where 1st two bytes of each record is an identifier for that record. How do I find distinct count of these records?

Flat file ex:

AB|123|hello moto|
AB|456|googly|
BC|sick day|booya|
ID|inter doing|hahahah

So I want to find distinct record count...

it should give me

AB 2
BC 1
ID 1

Pls help.

Try this:

awk -F'|' '{++c[$1]}END{for(i in c)print i,c[i]}' FlatFile.txt

it works, rock on.