One of my favorite things about unix is that you can chain commands together with pipe (|). Say for example that you have a example data file that looks like this:

  # Deflection    Col-Force       Beam-Force 
  0.000              0              0    
  0.001            104             51
  0.002            202            101
  0.003            298            148
  0.0031           104            149
  0.004            289            201
  0.0041           291            209
  0.005            104            250
  0.010            311            260
  0.020            104            240
  

You can chain commands together to quickly get ball park figures. I do this all the time when reviewing log data to get simple counts and look for anomalies.

  $ cat data.txt | grep -v '#' | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c
      1 0
      4 104
      1 202
      1 289
      1 291
      1 298
      1 311

Let me break this down a little. I cat data.txt, which just prints the contents to the console, I use grep to remove the # header, then use awk to print the second data column, the sort the values for my next procedure, and lastly I use uniq -c, which takes the input and counts all the unique values. So you can see that "4 104" means that 4 instances of 104 were found. I use this often to look at httpd logs for IP addresses or to review sudo commands, etc. Very handy!

ps. there are optimizations that could be done here, but that what is great about unix and "one function" utilities. There are many ways to the same destination!