Compress EACH LINE of a file individually and independently of one another? (or preserve newlines) - unix

Question

I have a very large file (~10 GB) that can be compressed to < 1 GB using gzip. I'm interested in using sort FILE | uniq -c | sort to see how often a single line is repeated, however the 10 GB file is too large to sort and my computer runs out of memory.
Is there a way to compress the file while preserving newlines (or an entirely different method all together) that would reduce the file to a small enough size to sort, yet still leave the file in a condition that's sortable?
Or any other method of finding out / countin how many times each line is repetead inside a large file (a ~10 GB CSV-like file) ?
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Are you sure you're running out of the Memory (RAM?) with your sort?
My experience debugging sort problems leads me to believe that you have probably run out of diskspace for sort to create it temporary files. Also recall that diskspace used to sort is usually in /tmp or /var/tmp.
So check out your available disk space with :
df -g
(some systems don't support -g, try -m (megs) -k (kiloB) )
If you have an undersized /tmp partition, do you have another partition with 10-20GB free? If yes, then tell your sort to use that dir with
sort -T /alt/dir
Note that for sort version
sort (GNU coreutils) 5.97
The help says
-T, --temporary-directory=DIR use DIR for temporaries, not $TMPDIR or /tmp;
multiple options specify multiple directories
I'm not sure if this means can combine a bunch of -T=/dr1/ -T=/dr2 ... to get to your 10GB*sortFactor space or not. My experience was that it only used the last dir in the list, so try to use 1 dir that is big enough.
Also, note that you can go to the whatever dir you are using for sort, and you'll see the acctivity of the temporary files used for sorting.
I hope this helps.
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Answer 2

There are some possible solutions:
1 - use any text processing language (perl, awk) to extract each line and save the line number and a hash for that line, and then compare the hashes
2 - Can / Want to remove the duplicate lines, leaving just one occurence per file? Could use a script (command) like:
awk '!x[$0]++' oldfile > newfile
3 - Why not split the files but with some criteria? Supposing all your lines begin with letters:
- break your original_file in 20 smaller files: grep "^a*$" original_file > a_file
- sort each small file: a_file, b_file, and so on
- verify the duplicates, count them, do whatever you want.