(code) RE: extract uniques and sort (thanks. 1WTDI)

[ybiC]

Here's what I ended up with for extracting uniques and sorting.   I know it can be further simplified, but my non-programmer brain can somewhat grok it as is.   Thanks again, all!
    cheers,
    ybiC

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $infile  = shift;
my $outfile = shift;
my %seen;

open (IN, "<$infile")           or die "Can't open $infile RO: $!";
open (OUT, ">$outfile")         or die "Can't open $outfile RW: $!";
    foreach my $item (<IN>) {   # parse $infile into a hash and remove
+ duplicate keys
        ++$seen{$item};
    }
    print OUT sort keys %seen;  # sort keys and save to $outfile
close IN                        or die "Cannot close $infile: $!";
close OUT                       or die "Cannot close $outfile: $!";

[Fastolfe]

You know, if this is all that your script does, you may want to consider using standard Unix tools sort and uniq:

$ cat unsorted | sort | uniq >sorted.unique

It will probably be a bit faster.

[merlyn]

Let's see. A useless cat, and a useless uniq. {grin}

$ sort -u unsorted >sorted.unique

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[Fastolfe]

I didn't realize 'sort' had a -u option. Does that work on Solaris? For some reason I thought I had read that 'sort' and 'uniq' were both required for that task, but now that I look, that's clearly not the case with at least Linux and OpenBSD. And since I was piping anyway, I thought I'd start it with a 'cat' just so the train of thought was easy to follow (first you start with the file, then you sort it, then you look for unique lines). *shrug*

[ybiC]

"consider std Unix sort and uniq..."

Thanks for the suggestion Fastolfe.   I considered that but the snippet is the tail end of a (still modest) 95 line script using Net::Telnet::Cisco to query LAN switches for CDP neighbors.   Number of switches is under 500 at my current company, so performance isn't really an issue.

Could still be a viable option, but I want do what as much as I can within the script itself, and without using system calls.
    cheers,
    ybiC