| 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
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
some-tab-producing-command | uniq-table > informative-columns.tsv
Recommended Workflow
- Feed
uniq-table a tab-delimited table with a stable header and representative early rows.
- Run it after a step that produces comparison-style columns you want to trim.
- Inspect the output headers to confirm only meaningful columns remain.
- 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.
