Looking at the shell script, I think it will always be somewhat slow as it's sorting twice. One pass to sort the words so that "uniq -c" can work correctly, th

Looking at the shell script, I think it will always be somewhat slow as it's sorting twice. One pass to sort the words so that "uniq -c" can work correctly, then the reverse numeric sort. I don't think the shell used matters, as most of the cpu time is in the sorting.