Given the following list of presidents do a top ten word count in the smallest program possible:
INPUT FILE
Washington
Washington
Adams
Jefferson
Jefferson
Madison
Madison
Monroe
Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Jackson
Jackson
Van Buren
Harrison
DIES
Tyler
Polk
Taylor
DIES
Fillmore
Pierce
Buchanan
Lincoln
Lincoln
DIES
Johnson
Grant
Grant
Hayes
Garfield
DIES
Arthur
Cleveland
Harrison
Cleveland
McKinley
McKinley
DIES
Teddy Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt
Taft
Wilson
Wilson
Harding
Coolidge
Hoover
FDR
FDR
FDR
FDR
Dies
Truman
Truman
Eisenhower
Eisenhower
Kennedy
DIES
Johnson
Johnson
Nixon
Nixon
ABDICATES
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Reagan
Bush
Clinton
Clinton
Bush
Bush
Obama
To start it off in bash 97 characters
cat input.txt | tr " " "\n" | tr -d "\t " | sed 's/^$//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 10
Output:
2 Nixon
2 Reagan
2 Roosevelt
2 Truman
2 Washington
2 Wilson
3 Bush
3 Johnson
4 FDR
7 DIES
Break ties as you see fit! Happy fourth!
For those of you who care more information on presidents can be found here.
A shorter shell version:
xargs -n1 < input.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
If you want case insensitive ranking, change uniq -c into uniq -ci.
Slightly shorter still, if you're happy about the rank being reversed and readability impaired by lack of spaces. This clocks in at 46 characters:
xargs -n1<input.txt|sort|uniq -c|sort -n|tail
(You could strip this down to 38 if you were allowed to rename the input file to simply "i" first.)
Observing that, in this special case, no word occur more than 9 times we can shave off 3 more characters by dropping the '-n' argument from the final sort:
xargs -n1<input.txt|sort|uniq -c|sort|tail
That takes this solution down to 43 characters without renaming the input file. (Or 35, if you do.)
Using xargs -n1 to split the file into one word on each line is preferable to the tr \ \\n solution, as that creates lots of blank lines. This means that the solution is not correct, because it misses out Nixon and shows a blank string showing up 256 times. However, a blank string is not a "word".