Plot frequency distribution of words from files on a terminal.

cat *.c | { printf "se te du\nplot '-' t '' w dots\n"; tr '[[:upper:]]' '[[:lower:]]' | tr -s [[:punct:][:space:]] '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 100 | awk '{print $1}END{print "e"}'; } | gnuplot
Uses the dumb terminal option in gnuplot to plot a graph of frequencies. In this case, we are looking at a frequency analysis of words in all of the .c files.
Sample Output 
$ cat *.c | { printf "se te du\nplot '-' t '' w dots\n"; tr '[[:upper:]]' '[[:lower:]]' | tr -s [[:punct:][:space:]] '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 100 | awk '{print $1}END{print "e"}'; } | gnuplot

  60 .+-----+------+------+------+-------+------+------+------+------+-----++
     +      +      +      +      +       +      +      +      +      +      +
     |                                                                      |
  50 ++                                                                    ++
     |                                                                      |
     |.                                                                     |
     |.                                                                     |
  40 ++                                                                    ++
     |                                                                      |
     | ..                                                                   |
  30 ++                                                                    ++
     |   .                                                                  |
     |                                                                      |
  20 ++  ..                                                                ++
     |     ..                                                               |
     |       ..                                                             |
     |         ...                                                          |
  10 ++           ....                                                     ++
     |                ...............                                       |
     +      +      +      +      +   .......................................+
   0 ++-----+------+------+------+-------+------+------+------+------+-----++
     0      10     20     30     40      50     60     70     80     90    100

5
By: taliver
2009-11-20 14:53:26
awk cat head printf sort tr uniq
1
Submit An Alternative

What Others Think

I love it. It's an insane extension of Kernighan & Pike's famous wordfreq shell script from their 1984 classic, "The UNIX Programming Environment", which went something like this, #!/bin/sh cat $* | tr -sc [:alpha:] '[\n*]' | tr [:upper:] [:lower:] | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n
hackerb9 · 868 weeks and 1 day ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

You must be signed in to comment.

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Similar Commands

Visualizing system performance data

Title Case Files

Count the frequency of every word for a given file

Manual CPU Frequency/Speed/Clock Set

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: