• Handy linux text slicing and dicing: http://dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_16.html#SEC234
• get list of words from a bunch of text files cat *.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | egrep -o '[A-Za-z]+' | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | sort | uniq -c (took 32 secs)

-- MattWalsh - 10 Oct 2008