I usually use this script and pipe the results to a text file:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# $Id: wordfreq.perl,v 1.13 2001/05/16 23:46:40 doug Exp $
# http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ <= old URL; dead now
# http://dada.perl.it/shootout/wordfreq.perl.html <= URL as of time th
+is post was written

# Tony Bowden suggested using tr versus lc and split(/[^a-z]/)

use strict;

my %count = ();
while (read(STDIN, $_, 4095) and $_ .= <STDIN>) {
    tr/A-Za-z/ /cs;
    ++$count{$_} foreach split(' ', lc $_);
}

my @lines = ();
my ($w, $c);
push(@lines, sprintf("%7d\t%s\n", $c, $w)) while (($w, $c) = each(%cou
+nt));
print sort { $b cmp $a } @lines;
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planetscape

Using a one-liner (and same formatting as previous posts):

$ perl -nle '$w{$_}++ for grep /\w/, map { s/[\. ,]*$//g; lc($_) } spl
+it; sub END { printf("%7d\t%s\n", $c, $w) while (($w,$c) = each(%w)) 
+}' files...
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The standard UNIX tool chain works fine:

perl -nle "print for /(\w['\w-]*)/g" input.text | sort | uniq -c | sor
+t -rn | tee word-list.text
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In my example, output is in the form of a perl hash(ref) structure. This lets you load it easily in another program using do.

my %seen=();
while(<>)
{
    chomp;
    foreach my $word ( grep /\w/, split )
    {
        $word =~ s/[. ,]*$//; # strip off punctuation, etc.
        $seen{$word}++;
    }
}

use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;
print Dumper \%seen;
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Click on a letter above to see phrasal verbs beginning with that lette
+r.
You will get a list of phrasal verbs and their definitions. If you the
+n
click on an individual verb, you will get more information on it,
including example sentences, whether it is British or American English
+,
and whether it is separable or not.
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{
          'you' => 2,
          'a' => 2,
          'not' => 1,
          'that' => 1,
          'sentences' => 1,
          'individual' => 1,
          'see' => 1,
          'on' => 3,
          'American' => 1,
          'or' => 2,
          'verb' => 1,
          'Click' => 1,
          'list' => 1,
          'English' => 1,
          'letter' => 2,
          'their' => 1,
          'whether' => 2,
          'with' => 1,
          'and' => 2,
          'verbs' => 2,
          'of' => 1,
          'is' => 2,
          'definitions' => 1,
          'to' => 1,
          'above' => 1,
          'will' => 2,
          'If' => 1,
          'get' => 2,
          'including' => 1,
          'beginning' => 1,
          'it' => 3,
          'example' => 1,
          'information' => 1,
          'separable' => 1,
          'British' => 1,
          'click' => 1,
          'phrasal' => 2,
          'then' => 1,
          'You' => 1,
          'more' => 1,
          'an' => 1
        }
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