Menu
Coddy logo textTech

Word Frequency Counter

Part of the Fundamentals section of Coddy's Terminal journey. Lesson 81 of 82.

challenge icon

Challenge

Easy

Analyze the file article.txt and count how many times each word appears. Build a pipeline that:

  1. Reads the file content
  2. Converts spaces to newlines (one word per line) using tr ' ' '\n'
  3. Sorts the words alphabetically
  4. Counts occurrences of each word using uniq -c
  5. Sorts the results by count in descending order using sort -rn

Your output should show the word frequencies with the most common words first:

      5 the
      3 fox
      3 quick
      2 dog
      2 lazy
      2 over
      1 a
      1 all
      1 amused
      1 brown
      1 by
      1 day
      1 happy
      1 hill
      1 is
      1 jumps
      1 not
      1 ran
      1 sleeps
      1 was

Combine all the commands into a single pipeline using the pipe | operator.

Hint: Start with cat article.txt and chain the commands: tr to split words, sort to group them, uniq -c to count, and sort -rn to order by frequency.

Try it yourself

Terminal

All lessons in Fundamentals

Practice on your own: Terminal playground