Leverage Lua to display a unique set of alphabetized urls on stdin: #! /usr/bin/env lua local sort = io.popen('sort -u', 'w') for line in io.stdin:lines() do for url in string.gmatch(line, '(http[s]://.-)[%)%]%s\n]') do url = string.gsub(url, '/$', '') sort:write(url .. '\n') end end sort:close()