Splitt a text into its words, count the occurrences, sort it by that and save it to a file.

shell-sort-text-words

Shell command:
cat text.txt | tr -sc 'A-Za-z' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr >> counts.txt


The content of text.txt:
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet. Lorem ipsum.


The result in counts.txt:
2 Lorem
1 Sit
1 Ipsum
1 ipsum
1 Dolor
1 Amet


Commands:

cat text.txt
=> displays the content of the text.txt file

tr -sc 'A-Za-z' '\n' < text.txt
  -s            squeezes repetitions
  -c            complements the set
  'A-Za-z'      the character set to find
  '\n'          the translation
=> translates every input character into a new line, that is not a character (complement of A-Za-z).

sort
=> sorts the lines alphabetically

uniq -c 
  -c  count
=> counts the occurrences and put the number before each line

sort -n -r
  -n  numeric sort
  -r  in reverse order
=> sorts the lines by the counts in a decreasing order

>> counts.txt
=> saves the output into the file counts.txt