bash sort / uniq -c: how to use tab instead of space as delimiter in output?

Question

I have a file strings.txt listing strings, which I am processing like this:

sort strings.txt | uniq -c | sort -n > uniq.counts

So the resulting file uniq.counts will list uniq strings sorted in the ascending order by their counts, so something like this:

 1 some string with    spaces
 5 some-other,string
25 most;frequent:string

Note that strings in strings.txt may contain spaces, commas, semicolons and other separators, except for the tab. How can I get uniq.counts to be in this format:

 1<tab>some string with    spaces
 5<tab>some-other,string
25<tab>most;frequent:string

Answer 1

You can do:

sort strings.txt | uniq -c | sort -n | sed -E 's/^ *//; s/ /\t/' > uniq.counts

sed will first remove all leading spaces at the beginning of the line (before counts) and then it will replace space after count to tab character.