Computers are good at counting. We frequently need to count items such as the number of sites sending us spam, the number of downloads different web pages get, or how often words are used in a piece of text. This recipes show how to calculate word usage in a piece of text. The techniques are also applicable to log files, database output, and more.
Finding the frequency of words used in a given file
Getting ready
We can use the associative arrays of awk to solve this problem in different ways. Words are alphabetic characters, delimited by space or a period. First, we should parse all the words in a given file and then the count of each word needs to be found. Words can be parsed using regex with tools such as sed, awk, or grep.
