Getting the count of unique values in a column in bash

Question

I have tab delimited files with several columns. I want to count the frequency of occurrence of the different values in a column for all the files in a folder and sort them in d

Answer 1

Here is a way to do it in the shell:

FIELD=2
cut -f $FIELD * | sort| uniq -c |sort -nr

This is the sort of thing bash is great at.