How to get the number of repeating fields in a text?

Question

linux

Hey! And so the text is in the following
message datetime id
form

awk '{print $1}' data.log | sort -t' ' -k3 -rn | uniq -c

But here is one problem: how to get this number of repetitions into a variable? Or are there any other ways?

Answer 1

Thank you! Maybe I didn’t describe what I needed very clearly, but here’s what I wanted

sort -t' ' -k3 data.log | uniq -c | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//' | awk '{print $1}'

Answer 2

awk '{print $1}' data.log | sort -t' ' -k3 -rn | uniq | wc -l

Answer 3

wc?