How to create a frequency list of every word in a file?

Question

I have a file like this:

This is a file with many words.
Some of the words appear more than once.
Some of the words only appear one time.

I

Answer 1

Let's use AWK!

This function lists the frequency of each word occurring in the provided file in Descending order:

function wordfrequency() {
  awk '
     BEGIN { FS="[^a-zA-Z]+" } {
         for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) {
             word = tolower($i)
             words[word]++
         }
     }
     END {
         for (w in words)
              printf("%3d %s\n", words[w], w)
     } ' | sort -rn
}

You can call it on your file like this:

$ cat your_file.txt | wordfrequency

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Source: AWK-ward Ruby