Find Unique Characters in a File

Question

I have a file with 450,000+ rows of entries. Each entry is about 7 characters in length. What I want to know is the unique characters of this file.

For instance, if my f

Answer 1

Quick and dirty solution using grep (assuming the file name is "file"):

for char in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z; do 
    if [ ! -z "`grep -li $char file`" ]; then 
        echo -n $char; 
    fi; 
done; 
echo

I could have made it a one-liner but just want to make it easier to read.

(EDIT: forgot the -i switch to grep)