#!/usr/bin/env python import sys from operator import itemgetter wordcounts = {} for line in open(sys.argv[1]).readlines(): for word in [x for x in line.rstrip().lower().split() if x.isalpha()]: wordcounts[word] = wordcounts.get(word, 0) + 1 for (word, ct) in sorted(wordcounts.items(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True): print '%s\t%s' % (ct, word)