Groupwise uniq command?

Question

I am searching for a command to get from a file in this format:

hello 32
hello 67
hi    2
ho    1212
ho    1390
ho    3000

To this format (deduplicate by taking the last row of a "group"):

hello 67
hi    2
ho    3000

At the moment I am using a Python and pandas snippet:

    df = pd.read_csv(self.input().path, sep='\t', names=('id', 'val'))

    # how to replace this logic with shell commands?
    surface = df.drop_duplicates(cols=('id'), take_last=True)

    with self.output().open('w') as output:
        surface.to_csv(output, sep='\t', cols=('id', 'val'))

---

Update: Thanks for the great answers. Here are some benchmarks:

Input file is 246M and contains 8583313 lines. Order does not matter. First column has a fixed size of 9 chars.

Example of the input file:

000000027       20131017023259.0        00
000000027       20131017023259.0        11
000000035       20130827104320.0        01
000000035       20130827104320.0        04
000000043       20120127083412.0        01
...

---

                              time        space complexity

tac .. | sort -k1,1 -u        27.43682s   O(log(n))
Python/Pandas                 11.76063s   O(n)
awk '{c[$1]=$0;} END{for(...  11.72060s   O(n)

Since the first column has a fixed length, uniq -w can also be used:

tac {input} | uniq -w 9        3.25484s   O(1)

Answer 1

This seems crazy, and hopefully there's a better way, but:

tac foo | sort -k 1,1 -u

tac is used to reverse the file, so you get the last rather than the first.

-k 1,1 says use only the first field for comparison.

-u makes it unique.

Answer 2

If you don't mind the order of output, here's an awk solution:

$ awk '
    {a[$1] = !a[$1] ? $2 : a[$1] < $2 ? $2 : a[$1]}
    END {
        for (i in a) { print i,a[i] }
    }
' file
hi 2
hello 67
ho 3000

Answer 3

Some more options:

1. perl, if you don't care about the order of the lines.

   perl -lane '$k{$F[0]}=$F[1]; END{print "$_ $k{$_}" for keys(%k)}' file
   

2. A simpler awk

   awk '{c[$1]=$0;} END{for(i in c){print c[i]}}' file
   

3. A silly shell one

   while read a b; do grep -w ^"$a" file | tail -n1 ; done < file | uniq
   

Answer 4

Well you can do it with sort

sort -u -k1,1 test

EDIT: tac is the solution