bash shell [sort, uniq, ect]

cmason22

i know this isn't the perfect forum for this question, but i thought i'd see if someone can help.

i'm working with a tab delimited file that looks something like:

i need to remove lines where the first field is not unique. i haven't found a way to use sort or uniq because each of the lines are unique since there are values in the line that are unique.

anyone know how to sort -u OR uniq while ignoring all but the first field?

i'm pulling this file in thru PHP and processing it for html output. so if there's a way to accomplish the same thing in php while reading or processing the file, that would be great too. in the case of repeats, the first occurance is the one i want to keep so maybe there's a way to skip a row if $field1 is the same as $field1 was on the last loop? hopefully this makes enought sense.

thanks

LordShryku

Will the duplicates always be back to back?

You should probably also show some code so we can grasp how your doing this.