word_frequency

#!/bin/sh
#word frequency with 5-column printout
#author: donald l. merand

#get contents of file(s)
cat "$@" |
#remove anything that's not alphanumeric
tr -cs "[:alpha:]'" "\n" |
#convert everything to lowercase
tr "A-Z" "a-z" |
#sort results
sort |
#count number of occurences of each word
uniq -c |
#now sort by the count, largest first
sort -r |
#order the output in 5-column, 20-char width
awk '{printf("%-20s\t", $0);if (NR % 5 == 0) {print ""}}'