How many members are there in this mailing list?

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On 27-12-09 01:08, Steve wrote:

> I’m sure a statistician could produce some very pretty pie-charts form
> that :-))

 From my presentation at BarCamp Ghent on 19 December:
http://www.slideshare.net/amedeevangasse/common-mistakes-in-data-visualization
slide 21...

> While the results aren’t of any great use to me. The method of obtaining
> the is.  Tomorrow I’ll be having a read of the man pages to see what all
> the switches in 'zgrep -e '^From: .*' 2009-December.txt.gz | sort | uniq
> -c | sort -nr | head -n 30' are for and learning another bit of the jigsaw
> puzzle. Thanks.

grep is used too look for strings and patterns in files
zgrep is the gzip version of grep, that is: it looks in .gz files
-e means that I'm looking for a regular expression
'^From: .*' is the regex; ^ means the pattern must be at the start of a 
line; .* means anything is allowed. So I'm looking for 
"start-of-line-From:-space-whatever"
2009-December.txt.gz is the file that I'm looking in
| is a pipe, it means send output from program to the left as input to 
the program on the right
sort is just what it says, sort the output
uniq removes duplicates
-c counts how many times a duplicate appears
-nr sort again, but numerical (because of the counts) and in reverse 
order (biggest numbers first)
head -n 30 shows only the first 30 lines