Finding the frequency of words used in a given file

Finding the frequency of words used in a file is an interesting exercise to apply the text-processing skills. It can be done in many different ways. Let's see how to do it.

Getting ready

We can use associative arrays, awk, sed, grep, and so on, to solve this problem in different ways. Words are alphabetic characters, delimited by space or a period. First, we should parse all the words in a given file and then the count of each word needs to be found. Words can be parsed by using regex with any of the tools, such as sed, awk, or grep.

How to do it...

We just saw the logic and ideas about the solution; now let's create the shell script as follows:

#!/bin/bash
#Name: word_freq.sh
#Desc: Find out frequency of words in a file

if [ $# -ne 1 ];
then
  echo "Usage: $0 filename";
  exit -1
fi

filename=$1

egrep -o "\b[[:alpha:]]+\b" $filename | \

awk '{ count[$0]++ }
END{ printf("%-14s%s\n","Word","Count") ;
for(ind in count)
{  printf("%-14s%d\n...