topfew ☆

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Description:
Finds the field values which appear most often in a stream of records

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: cli data-analysis streaming text-processing utilities

Install: brew install topfew

About:
Topfew is a command-line utility designed to efficiently identify the most frequently occurring values within a specific field of large, delimited data streams. It processes data incrementally, allowing it to handle files larger than available memory without performance degradation. This makes it an ideal tool for quick, ad-hoc analysis of logs, CSVs, or any structured text.

Key Features:

Memory-efficient streaming processing for datasets larger than RAM
Flexible field selection by name or position
Configurable field separators (e.g., comma, space, tab)
Fast, single-pass algorithm optimized for speed

Use Cases:

Analyzing web server logs to find the most frequent IP addresses or requested URLs
Processing large CSV files to identify top-selling products or most common categories
Quickly summarizing high-volume event streams from system or application logs

Alternatives:

awk/sort/uniq – Topfew is significantly faster and more memory-efficient for this specific task, as it avoids sorting the entire dataset.
q – A lighter-weight, purpose-built alternative for simple frequency counting, whereas 'q' offers full SQL query capabilities.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit