Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How to do it...

We just explored 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",ind,count[ind]); 
        }
      }

The script will generate this output:

    $ ./word_freq.sh words.txt 
    Word          Count 
    used           1
    this             2 
    counting   1