uniq-table

name	uniq-table
description	Use when removing invariant columns from a tab-delimited table, especially in EDirect or bioinformatics comparison pipelines.
disable-model-invocation	true
user-invocable	true

uniq-table

Small AWK filter that keeps only tab-separated columns whose values change somewhere after row 2. It is a column-pruning tool, not a row-deduplication tool: constant columns disappear, while varying columns are preserved for every row.

Quick Start

• Command: uniq-table
• Local executable: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/uniq-table
• Input format: Tab-delimited text on stdin

When To Use This Tool

• Stripping columns that are constant across the compared rows
• Reducing wide comparison tables down to only informative fields
• Cleaning tabular output from EDirect text pipelines before manual review
• Highlighting which columns actually vary across records

Common Patterns

# Keep only columns that vary after row 2
printf 'sample\tgroup\tconst\n1\tA\tkeep\n2\tA\tkeep\n3\tB\tkeep\n4\tB\tkeep\n' | uniq-table

Output from local testing:
sample    group
1         A
2         A
3         B
4         B

# Use inside a pipeline
some-tab-producing-command | uniq-table > informative-columns.tsv

Recommended Workflow

1. Feed uniq-table a tab-delimited table with a stable header and representative early rows.
2. Run it after a step that produces comparison-style columns you want to trim.
3. Inspect the output headers to confirm only meaningful columns remain.
4. Save or pass the reduced table downstream for reporting or manual review.

Guardrails

• uniq-table does not deduplicate rows. It drops columns that never change after row 2.
• The script hard-codes FS = "\t", so whitespace-separated tables are not handled correctly.
• Because the executable is just an AWK script, uniq-table -help shows the generic gawk help text, not tool-specific usage.
• Source inspection shows row 2 is used as the baseline for deciding whether later rows make a column “interesting”.
• If a column is constant from row 2 onward, it is removed even if row 1 is a header with a different string value.