Processing a text line-by-line removing leading spaces on each line is easy:

$ LC_ALL=C git ls-files | sed -nE 's:^.*(\.[^./]+)$:\1:p' \ | sort | uniq -c | sort -snr > lines # create example "lines" file $ cat lines # "lines" example file 30 .md 8 .png 4 .yml 1 .css 1 .gitignore 1 .ico 1 .sh 1 .txt $ sed -Ee 's/^ +//' lines # removing leading spaces (U+0020) 30 .md 8 .png 4 .yml 1 .css 1 .gitignore 1 .ico 1 .sh 1 .txt 

However if only the first line should set the number of spaces to remove of all subsequent lines, how to achieve this? The output would look like:

30 .md 8 .png 4 .yml 1 .css 1 .gitignore 1 .ico 1 .sh 1 .txt 

What I'm trying to achieve is to pipe it to column(1) and make the output more dense but keeping the horizontal spacing across all lines. Simulation:

$ column -x lines | expand -t 8 30 .md 8 .png 4 .yml 1 .css 1 .gitignore 1 .ico 1 .sh 1 .txt 

Right now w/o trimming on the left a lot of space is in use as uniq(1) with the -c option adds them as it does right-justify the numbers (at position 8).

As long as I assume the maximum count is fixed, e.g. at maximum two digits long, I could hard-code it:

sed -Ee 's/^ {5}//' lines | column -x | expand -t 8 30 .md 8 .png 4 .yml 1 .css 1 .gitignore 1 .ico 1 .sh 1 .txt