192 - Word Frequency

Problem

Write a bash script to calculate the frequency of each word in a text file words.txt.

For simplicity sake, you may assume:

• words.txt contains only lowercase characters and space ' ' characters.
• Each word must consist of lowercase characters only.
• Words are separated by one or more whitespace characters.

Example:

Assume that words.txt has the following content:

the day is sunny the the
the sunny is is

Your script should output the following, sorted by descending frequency:

the 4
is 3
sunny 2
day 1

Note:

• Don't worry about handling ties, it is guaranteed that each word's frequency count is unique.
• Could you write it in one-line using Unix pipes?

Code

# Read from the file words.txt and output the word frequency list to stdout.
cat words.txt | awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;++i) print $i}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnk 1 | awk '{print $2, $1}'

Link: https://leetcode.com/problems/word-frequency/