can you count letter or number frequency?

[None-yet]

I know you can count word frequency using the command-line. But can you count letter or number frequency?

 

[JasKinasis]

This should probably do the trick:

\grep -o . /path/to/file | sort | uniq -ic > /path/to/output-file

 

[KGIII]

I am a simple man...

fgrep -o $1 foo.txt | wc -l

Where $1 is your letter or number and 'foo.txt' is the file you want to check.

There are probably dozens of ways to do this. Don't make me pull out my rusty Perl skills!

 

[KGIII]

Hmm... There's also this:

awk '{c+=gsub(s,s)}END{print c}' s='a' test.txt

Sample output:

awk '{c+=gsub(s,s)}END{print c}' s='$1' foo.txt
196

Which matches the output from the first, so is presumably correct.

I ran both commands with 'time' and using awk is consistently the faster of the two. If you're working with a huge file, that'd probably shave off a few seconds.

 

[None-yet]

Thanks all. I have four dictionaries, I want to do my own char count to see for myself what chars are the most freq. Just read a book all about this topic that I found really interesting about words. Yea, my mom said I was weird. Used to read the newspapers/reference when I was 10.

 

[KGIII]

Oh, for that, you can do this:

sed 's/\(.\)/\1\n/g' $1 | sort | uniq -c

That'll include not just letters but numbers and other characters. That'll save you a ton of time and you won't have to run it multiple times for different characters.

Ain't the terminal awesome?!?

 

[KGIII]

Also, why do you have drum tab in your signature? What song is it for?

 

[JasKinasis]

Also, why do you have drum tab in your signature? What song is it for?

I was wondering that too!!!
The staves don’t line up properly in the tab in my browser either - so I had trouble reading it. Was going to copy paste it into a text editor later to get a better look!! Ha ha!!