Recently we were looking for common components that might indicate why some of our tests failed. One of the sysadmins at our Sunnyvale lab came up with a quick script which did the job. He used ‘uniq -c’ to great effect. In this example I look in my iTunes directory structyre for songs which ‘love’ in the title, and then count how many are on each album…. an example is probably better

lovebox:Compilations gjl$ find . -print | grep -i love | awk ' BEGIN { FS="/" } ; { print $2 }' | uniq -c | sort -n

 8 Ministry Of Sound Disco Classi
   6 Music To Watch Girls By Vol 3
   5 The Best Of Sade
   4 Back To Love 03.03
   3 Funk Soul Anthems
   3 CD Singles
   3 Acoustic Hits
   2 Twelve Ibiza Classics - Adventures In Wonderland
   2 The Very Best Of
   2 Take Me to God
   2 Nu Cool (Disc 2)
   2 Music for Cocktails (Part 4)
   2 Ministry Of Sound Chillout Classics (CD2)
   2 MOS_ Funky House 2005 (Disc 1)
   2 Jason Moore - Triptonite (Disc 1)
   2 JDJ Danny Rampling
   2 Indie Anthems
   2 Ibiza - The History Of Chillout (Disc 3)
   2 Greatest 80's Album (Disk2)
   2 Greatest 80's Album (Disc 1)
   2 Fabriclive 11_ Bent
   2 Electro Jazz Divas
   2 Electro 7
   2 Chilled Jazz
   2 Best Pub Jukebox
   2 All Together Now
   2 A Time To Remember 1970
   2 12__80s [Disc 2]
   2 12__80s [Disc 1]
   1 ian_pooley_presents_a_subterranean_soundtrack
   1 Your Hundred Best Tunes, Volume 8
   1 Your Hundred Best Tunes, Volume 3
   1 Welcome To The Monkey House
   1 The Triptych (Disc 2)
   1 The Remix Album
   1 The Rebirth Of Cool 6
   1 Teenage Kicks
   1 Sty Wars - A Collection Of Pork Medallions
   1 Solid Steel presents.._
   1 Serve Chilled (Disc 2)
   1 Serve Chilled (Disc 1)
   1 Putumayo Presents_ Latin Lounge
   1 Profound Sounds Vol. 1
   1 Nu Cool (Disc 1)
   1 Music for Cocktails (Part 6)
   1 Music for Cocktails (Part 5)
   1 Music for Cocktails (Part 3)
   1 Music for Cocktails (Part 2)