The only difference is I sort before uniquing, but the python code uniques before sorting. But the result is identical (and in shell scripting, you can't unique without sorting first).
Although FWIW I just checked and the `sort` tool actually has a flag for uniquing during the sort. I don't know if that's portable though.
Arguably your solution is still different because you sort the input instead of the output, but that's unlikely to matter here.