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This is a favorite question of mine as well, but I expect the developer to be pragmatic and provide me a scripting solution that can be written and run in less than 5 minutes.
// cat individual files into all.txt
// and do the rest in awk one liner
awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) c[tolower($1)]++} END {for(w in c) print w, c[w]}'
// output can be sorted in both ways in the same statement as well
... | sort | tee alpha_sorted.txt | sort -k 2 -nr > freq_sorted.txt
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