Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey Unix gurus,

I would like to count the number occurrences of all the words (regardless of case) across multiple files, preferably outputting them in descending order of occurrence. This is well beyond my paltry shell scripting ability.

Researching, I can find many scripts/commands that allow me to find occurrences of one word (basic grep stuff).

Any help would be appreciated.

Try:

Code:

awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) a[tolower($i)]++}END{for (i in a) print i" "a[i]}' * | sort -nrk2

Similar idea:
Convert the file contents to lower case. Change any space or tab to a newline. Remove any blank lines. Sort each word to alphabetic order. Count unique occurances. Sort by descending order of count.

Code:

cat *.txt|tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | tr ' \t' '\n\n'|sed -e "/^$/d"| \
          sort|uniq -c|sort -nr

Many solutions (depending of your definition of a word)...

A possible solution :

Code:

tr -cs '[:alnum:]' '[\n*]' < inputfile | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Jean-Pierre.

Thank you all that replied.

I tried bartus's solution and it worked quite nice. Awk programming is definitely over my head.

I shall try the others as time permits.

Many thanks!