Scale of stuff to look at

pbpaste | cat | wc
   65536    9807  101150

• pbpaste takes the contents of the clipboard and sends it to stdout
• | pipe character which "pipes" stdout to stdin of the following command
• cat concatenates to stdout . I use cat here defensively: cat seems to do some smart things with encodings, "conditioning" the text for use by other utilities and in this simple pipeline could have been omitted with identical results. I have encountered situations in which subsequent processing of the clipboard contents behaved better when using pbpaste if I inserted cat . It may be superfluous voodoo
• wc performs a word count, reporting number of lines, number of words, number of characters * The clipboard apparently has
  • 65536 lines -- more than I want to look at -- Most are probably empty. That number is 2^16 and probably represents the maximum number of possible rows.
  • 9807 words
  • 101150 characters

Scale of unique stuff

pbpaste | cat | sort | uniq -c | wc
     967    2571   14253

• sort sorts the lines
• uniq -c finds unique lines, the -c flag says to count how many instances of each line occurred
• I was actually wanting to see the unique lines, but by starting with wc I got an idea of how much stuff I was going to need to look at, here nearly 1000 lines.

The unique stuff

pbpaste | cat | sort | uniq -c | less

• same as above except replace wc with less which lets me page backwards and forwards through the output.

The unique stuff of likely interest that isn't a problem number

pbpaste | cat | grep '^[A-Z]' | sort | uniq -c | less

• similar to above, but only show lines which start with a capital letter
• grep g eneralized   r egular   e xpression   p arser looks at lines and passes ones which match to stdout discarding non-matches
  • ^ anchors to the start of the line
  • [A-Z] matches any single character in the given range
  • single quotes to protect the search pattern from interpretation by the shell

Check the other stuff

pbpaste | cat | grep -v '^[A-Z]' | sort | uniq -c | less

• same as above, except the -v flag tells grep to reverse its behavior, send lines which do not match to stdout
• Why? To see if I missed anything of interest.