Shell Programming and Scripting

hello,
Here is a program for creating a word-frequency

# wf.gk --- program to generate word frequencies from a file
{
# remove punctuation: This will remove all punctuations from the file
gsub(/[^[:alnum:]_[:blank:]]/, "", $0)
#Start frequency analysis
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
freq[$i]++
}
END
#Print output
{
for (word in freq)
printf "%s\t%d\n", word, freq[word]
}
The program runs fine but I cannot get the last part to print out the frequency first and then massage the data to sort from Highest to lowest.
Please help and if possible and if it is not too much trouble, could the code be commented to help me and others like me learn.
Many thanks in advance,

Gimley

Code:

 your_command| sort -k2nr

Hello,
Many thanks for the reply. I applied the command in the file but I still get the frequency ofn the right hand side, whereas the sort I need is as under:
FREQUENCY WORD
and the frequency should be from HIGHEST TO LOWEST.
Sorry for the hassle
Gimley

if the frequency is in first column, try this command:

Code:

 your_command| sort -nr

Dear rdcwayx,
I tried but to no avail. The modified code is as under: Have I done anyhting wrong ? it consistently spews out word first and the frequency next. Sorry for the hassle. May be I should have given a sample and the desired output
Here is the sample:
FN: testwf
John Mary Henry Henry John Smith Gimley Tolkien

Present Output: testwf.frq

Tolkien 1
Smith 1
Gimley 1
Henry 2
Mary 1
John 2
The code sorts the Names in descending order
Desired output
What I need is frequency first sorted in descending order, followed by name:
2 John
2 Henry
1 Gimley
1 Mary
1 Smith
1 Tolkien
Here is the code, with the modification you suggested built in:

# wordfreq.awk --- print list of word frequencies
{
# remove punctuation
#gsub(/[^[:alnum:]_[:blank:]]/, "", $0)
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++)
freq[$i]++
}
END {
for (word in freq)
printf "%s\t%d\n", word, freq[word]
sort -nr
}

Try this,

Code:

awk '{gsub(/[^[:alnum:]_[:blank:]]/, "", $0);for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {freq[$i]++}} END {for (word in freq){printf "%d\t%s\n", freq[word],word}}' inputfile | sort -nr

Hi Pravin27,
It works and frequency comes first. But the frequency does not seem to sort.
Here is the output
1 Tolkien
1 Smith
1 Gimley
2 Henry
1 Mary
2 John
This is not too bad. I can sort on the frequency if there is no way out.
Many thanks for the help

Gimley