title: How to count the unique values in 2 fields without concatenating them?
body: <p>I am trying to using the basic shell in unix to count the unique values in 2 fields. I have data with 5 columns but just what to count the unique values in the first 2 WITHOUT concatenating them.
  So far I am successful in using cut -f 1 | sort | uniq | wc -l in counting the unique values in column one and I can do the same for column two but because some of the values are the same in column one and two I need to be able to do this command treating column 1 and 2 as one field. Can anyone help me please?</p>