I had to sort and uniq (create a unique set of strings) a large list with lots of duplicate. My options were to write it in Java or download cygwin and run: cat file | sort | uniq > result

Cygwin download never works for me. After I spend lots of time selecting a juicy list of utilities, it always fails somewhere in the download process. I liked it much better when it was a single download.

I opted for Java route naturally. After all it was just a single line of code really.

for(String item:getFileAsSet(args[0])) System.out.println(item);

Obviously you are wondering where the heck do I get getFileAsSet. It is just one of the many reusable java utilities I created to make my job easier. The crucial part of the code for this utility is:

TreeSet set = new TreeSet();
while((temp = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            temp = temp.trim(); // Hate spaces; Your mileage may vary
            if(temp.length() > 0) {
                	set.add(temp);
            }
}

The beauty of this code is that TreeSet is a SortedSet implementation. Adding to the Set automatically ensures elimination of duplicates as well as sorting. All I had to do was just print the result.