using “uniq” and ignore the first chars, instead of words

Question

i have a list of files in a folder. the list of files is displayed using:

ls

now, i want to pipe that to uniq so it'll ignore the first 6 charactes before comparing.
is it possible? or perhaps i need to use another command?
thank you

Answer 1

pipe the output of ls first to sed to strip away the first X characters and then pipe it to uniq.

% ls | sed -e 's/.\{X\}//' | uniq

(note: replace X with 6 in your case)

Answer 2

Use the -s (--skip-chars) option if your version of uniq has it.

ls | uniq -s 6

or

ls | uniq --skip-chars=6