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 decreasing order of count (highest count first). How would I accomplish this in a Linux command line environment?

It can use any common command line language like awk, perl, python etc.

Answer 1

To see a frequency count for column two (for example):

awk -F '\t' '{print $2}' * | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

fileA.txt

z    z    a
a    b    c
w    d    e

fileB.txt

t    r    e
z    d    a
a    g    c

fileC.txt

z    r    a
v    d    c
a    m    c

Result:

  3 d
  2 r
  1 z
  1 m
  1 g
  1 b