---
name: "unihist"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "uniutils"
version: "2.28-2"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/unihist"
---

# unihist(1)

Generate a histogram of the characters in a Unicode file

## NAME

unihist - Generate a histogram of the characters in a Unicode file

## SYNOPSIS

**unihist (\[option flags\])**

## DESCRIPTION

*unihist* generates a histogram of the characters in its input, which must be encoded in UTF-8 Unicode. By default, for each character it prints the frequency of the character as a percentage of the total, the absolute number of tokens in the input, the UTF-32 code in  hexadecimal, and, if the character is displayable, the glyph itself as UTF-8 Unicode. Command line flags allow unwanted information to be suppressed. In particular, note that by suppressing the percentages and counts it is possible to generate a list of the unique characters in the input.

Output is produced ordered by character code. To sort it in descending order of frequency, pipe the output into the command:\

sort -k1 -n -r

By default, *unihist* handles all of Unicode. To reduce memory usage and increase speed, it may be compiled so as to handle only the Basic Multilingual Plane (plane 0) by defining BMPONLY.\

## COMMAND LINE FLAGS

- \-c

  Suppress printing of counts and percentages.

- \-g

  Suppress printing of glyphs.

- \-h

  Print usage information.

- \-u

  Suppress printing of the Unicode code as text.

- \-v

  Print version information.

## SEE ALSO

uniname (1)

## REFERENCES

Unicode Standard, version 5.0

## AUTHOR

Bill Poser\
 billposer@alum.mit.edu

## LICENSE

GNU General Public License