The answer is 49.

42. When you know the question you will understand the answer

OK I'm gonna get sued by Douglas Adams' estate now.

I'll even help out,

first you open the file... then you read it... then you use regular expressions to find and remove duplicates, then close the file and open it for writing and write the new text back, then close the file again.


this has been done many many times over... use <insert favourite search engine here> to find a script and modify it.

Hey, he doesn't need to use regular expressions. A hash will do fine.

Didn't think about that

All he has to do is look in the Snippets section of this website, go to the perl section and read the "Script to Remove duplicate lines" snippet.

42.... been a long time since I read the book.

But that would be sensible and prevent unnecessary effort. This is the Internet, mister! We don't hold with that sort of behavior!

LOL.....