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

Ruby(1.9+)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
Dir["*"].each do |file|
    h=Hash.new(0)
    open(file).each do |row|
        row.chomp.split("\t").each do |w|
            h[ w ] += 1
        end
    end
    h.sort{|a,b| b[1]<=>a[1] }.each{|x,y| print "#{x}:#{y}\n" }
end