Often you may want to use Bash to calculate the frequency of each word in a given file.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
tr ' ' '\n' < athlete_data.txt | sort | uniq -c| sort -rn
This particular example will return the frequency of each unique word in the file named athlete_data.txt.
Here is how this syntax works:
- First, we use tr ‘ ‘ ‘\n’ to replace each space with a newline. This places each word on its own line.
- We then use sort to sort the lines.
- We then use uniq -c to count the occurrence of each unique word.
- We then use sort -rn to sort the results by frequency in descending order.
Note that you could use sort -n to instead sort the results by frequency in ascending order.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Use Bash to Calculate Frequency of Each Word in File
Suppose that we have a file named athlete_data.txt that contains the team name, position and conference for various basketball players.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of this file:
Now suppose that we would like to calculate the frequency of each word in this file.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
tr ' ' '\n' < athlete_data.txt | sort | uniq -c| sort -rn
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns the frequency of each word in the file.
For example, we can see:
- The word Guard occurs 5 times in the file.
- The word East occurs 4 times in the file.
- The word Celtics occurs 4 times in the file.
- The word West occurs 3 times in the file.
And so on.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Count Number of Unique Lines in File
Bash: How to Count Number of Characters in String
Bash: How to Count Number of Columns in File
