For example let's begin with the 'complete words' of Shakespeare in one file, sh.txt. We can use tr to tokenize the words by changing every sequence of nonalphabetic characters to a newline ('A-Za-z' means alphabetic, the -c option complements to non-alphabet, and the -s option squeezes all sequences into a single character): tr -sc 'A-Za-z' '\n' < sh.txt