Question

The sort command lets me put lines in alphabetical order and remove duplicate lines. I need something similar that can sort the words on a single line, put them in order, and remove any duplicates. Is there a command for this?

E.g.:

zebra ant spider spider ant zebra ant

Changes to:

ant spider zebra

There is no space before the first word or after the last word.

Answer 1

This works for me:

$ echo "zebra ant spider spider ant zebra ant" | xargs -n1 | sort -u | xargs
ant spider zebra

You can transform a list of words in a single row to a single column with xargs -n1 , use sort -u and transform back to a single row with xargs.