Help me find the flaws in my question resulting in down votes

Question

I posted this question which has garnered two down votes over two days (and counting): sort | uniq remove the counts that occur most often

Unfortunately it's too late to delete it as it has a good answer.

This could be an opportunity for self improvement and avoid the same pitfalls with future questions and/or improving this question for redemption.

The down-voters didn't leave comments as is often the case so, perhaps others can help point out the flaws in my question?

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy day the world gives most of us. Hopefully others can learn from your comments / answers too :)

Answer 1

_{What follows is my personal opinion; votes will show whether others agree or not. I like to be outspoken and clear which is sometimes misunderstood as being rude and hostile. Please bear with me; in no way do I intend to offend anybody.}

Your question is unclear and thus unlikely to help others. Only with the help of the answer am I able to guess what you’re asking for. Here’s what I think you’re actually asking:

I have a text file with multiple lines whose first (whitespace-separated) column contains an integer. I want to remove every line with

• the most occuring integer in this column and
• any integer greater than this most occuring one.

How can I do that?

Example input

  1 /mnt/e/bin/ps-suspects.sh Possible suspects causing problems
 11 1 S root       128     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -      03:27 ?
 11 4 Z root     19087  7064  0  80   0 -     0 -      03:32 ?
 11 1 S root        75     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -      03:27 ?
  3 1 S root       469     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -      03:27 ?
  3 1 S root       468     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -      03:27 ?
 22 0 S rick     17058  2859  0  80   0 -  7413 wait   16:56 pts/2

Here, 11 occurs most often and 22 is greater than 11, so every line containing 11 or 22 in the first column needs to be removed.

Example output

  1 /mnt/e/bin/ps-suspects.sh Possible suspects causing problems
  3 1 S root       469     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -      03:27 ?
  3 1 S root       468     2  0  60 -20 -     0 -      03:27 ?

This should be the question and seems to be the only part that’s relevant and possibly helpful to others. If you really feel like this could be an XY problem (and only then) you can include further information on why you need this, but:

• keep it clearly separated from the actual question (= “tl;dr” section), connected by footnote marks at most
• from the beginning, explain clearly where you’re coming from, what you want to achieve in the end and where you’re stuck
• (you certainly know what you’re doing, so) cut code and terminal output to only include relevant and non-redundant information
  The echo lines from your script are nothing but noise in the context of your question, and the post contains them twice.

Not nearly as important as what’s said above, but still worth mentioning: Add tags according to their description, not because the tag name happens to be mentioned in your post. Your question is about text-processing rather than sort or uniq.