Chain grep, sort, and wc in one command

Once grep, sort, and wc each make sense, the real work is composing them. One line can extract errors from a log and count them, or sort a user list and keep only matching names. There is no special “ninja” command — only pipes.

Read the file, keep the pattern, count what remains:

How many ERROR lines?

grep without wc still prints the matching lines. Add wc -l when you only need the number.

Sometimes order matters before you search. Sort the file, then keep the line you care about:

printf '%s\n' 'user: guest' 'user: root' 'user: admin' > logs.txt
cat logs.txt | sort | grep 'root'

Read left to right: produce lines, transform them, then keep or count. If a pipe looks wrong, run each piece alone until the output matches what the next command expects.