Awk: Words frequency from one text file, how to ouput into myFile.txt?

Question

Given a .txt files with space separated words such as:

But where is Esope the holly Bastard
But where is

And the Awk function :

cat /pathway/to/your/file.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2"@"$1}'

I get the following output in my console :

1 Bastard
1 Esope
1 holly
1 the
2 But
2 is
2 where

How to get into printed into myFile.txt ? I actually have 300.000 lines and near 2 millions words. Better to output the result into a file.

---

EDIT: Used answer (by @Sudo_O):

$ awk '{a[$1]++}END{for(k in a)print a[k],k}' RS=" |\n" myfile.txt | sort > myfileout.txt

Answer 1

Your pipeline isn't very efficient you should do the whole thing in awk instead:

awk '{a[$1]++}END{for(k in a)print a[k],k}' RS=" |\n" file > myfile

If you want the output in sorted order:

awk '{a[$1]++}END{for(k in a)print a[k],k}' RS=" |\n" file | sort > myfile

---

The actual output given by your pipeline is:

$ tr ' ' '\n' < file | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2"@"$1}'
Bastard@1
But@2
Esope@1
holly@1
is@2
the@1
where@2

Note: using cat is useless here we can just redirect the input with <. The awk script doesn't make sense either, it's just reversing the order of the words and words frequency and separating them with an @. If we drop the awk script the output is closer to the desired output (notice the preceding spacing however and it's unsorted):

$ tr ' ' '\n' < file | sort | uniq -c 
      1 Bastard
      2 But
      1 Esope
      1 holly
      2 is
      1 the
      2 where

We could sort again a remove the leading spaces with sed:

$ tr ' ' '\n' < file | sort | uniq -c | sort | sed 's/^\s*//'
1 Bastard
1 Esope
1 holly
1 the
2 But
2 is
2 where

But like I mention at the start let awk handle it:

$ awk '{a[$1]++}END{for(k in a)print a[k],k}' RS=" |\n" file | sort
1 Bastard
1 Esope
1 holly
1 the
2 But
2 is
2 where