genstats: Quick statistical reports

I can see the usefulness of genstats almost immediately. Given a text file, you can pull out a frequency report with very little effort.

And since genstats handles its input and output in much the same way as cut, you should be able to get the information you want within just a few minutes of compiling it.

It may not be appealing to you to track word frequency in a flat text file, but consider what you could do with genstats and your average log file. That is the author’s suggestion, and the screenshot on the home page gives a good example of some advanced genstats usage.

My only complaint about genstats is so trivial that I’m embarrassed to mention it. In a file with 12 lines, and with four of the words in the second field being the same, the display should read “33%,” not “0.33%.” The latter is a third of a percent, while the former is a third of the whole. Or perhaps there is another calculation at work there, that I’m not sure about.

I get the picture though. And having said that, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that gentstats doesn’t give you a lot of control over the output. As best I can tell, that is the only style of report you’ll see from genstats.

genstats appears to be a free-roaming program; it’s not in Arch/AUR or Debian. So if you want something quick and easy to package, this might be one. 😉