Greetings,

I have been using Plan 9 in various forms for a short while, and I am very
impressed with its minimalist design -- particularly its tendency not to
implement any function that can be done by combining other functions.

At first I missed rgrep et al, but I found that alternatives like 'grep $foo
`{du $bar}' worked just as well. So I was surprised to find the program
freq: it prints histograms of the character distributions in files. I am
interested in doing things like identifying the language of a file, and
thought it might be useful in tasks like that, but I wanted to ask what
people in the p9 community use it for.

Is freq used as the basis for other statistical tasks? Is it used by any
components of the OS? My apologies if this has already been discussed. I am
not interested in learning how it works (I have the man page and source),
rather I want to know the why behind its creation.

--underspecified