From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 15:37:51 +0900 From: underspecified To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_Part_33553_13848180.1191652671874" Subject: [9fans] The freq command Topicbox-Message-UUID: cb2652c2-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 ------=_Part_33553_13848180.1191652671874 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline 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 ------=_Part_33553_13848180.1191652671874 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline 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.

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