Find Unique Characters in a File

Question

I have a file with 450,000+ rows of entries. Each entry is about 7 characters in length. What I want to know is the unique characters of this file.

For instance, if my f

Answer 1

Quick and dirty C program that's blazingly fast:

#include 

int main(void)
{
  int chars[256] = {0}, c;
  while((c = getchar()) != EOF)
    chars[c] = 1;
  for(c = 32; c < 127; c++)  // printable chars only
  {
    if(chars[c])
      putchar(c);
  }

  putchar('\n');

  return 0;
}

Compile it, then do

cat file | ./a.out

To get a list of the unique printable characters in file.