Question

Basically my problem is this, I have a string delimited by periods, I want to be able to print each word on a new line with the number of times it occurs next to it.

Here is what I have already:
EDIT:

#!/bin/bash
PARAM=$1 
FILE=${1-test.txt}
#echo $FILE

temp=$( tr '\n' '.' <$FILE )

arr=$(echo $temp | tr "." "\n")

for x in $arr
do
    echo "$x"
done

All this does is print out each word on a line. Now I need to count the number of times each word appears and then print it out next to the word. For example:

temp contents = apple, pear, apple, peach

Output should be:

apple 2
pear 1
apple 2
peach 1

where each word is on a new line.

Answer 1

uniq(1) can probably do what you want. For example:

$ echo 'foo.bar.baz.bar.foo.box.foo' | tr '.' '\n' | sort | uniq -c
      2 bar
      1 baz
      1 box
      3 foo
$

Note that uniq requires sorted input to be able to properly count occurrences.