a straight grep

The best way to get an idea is to measure, that is, produce several fake input data sets, increasing in size, representative of the data you expect to get in the future, and benchmark to see the performance of the various approaches. You've said "grep" twice now, but haven't shown an example of that, so without that, we can't really talk about performance comparisons objectively.

As for the code shown so far, I think the Perl code I posted should have a significantly smaller memory footprint than cut | sort | uniq (or cut | sort -u, as hippo said), since the only thing my code keeps in memory is the resulting output data set (that is, the keys of the hash; the numeric hash values shouldn't add a ton of overhead). I haven't measured yet though! (it's Saturday evening here after all ;-) )

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