--- /dev/null
+#!/bin/sh
+
+# Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+# the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
+# (at your option) any later version.
+#
+# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+# GNU General Public License for more details.
+#
+# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+# along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+# This script intends to facilitate spell checking of comments in C sources.
+# It:
+# - extracts comments from C files
+# - transforms the comments into a list of lowercase words
+# - prefixes each word with the frequency
+# - filters out words within a frequency range
+# - sorts the words, longest first
+#
+# For:
+# ...
+# $ ./gdb/contrib/words.sh $(find gdb -type f -name "*.c" -o -name "*.h")
+# ...
+# it generates a list of ~15000 words prefixed with frequency.
+#
+# This could be used to generate a dictionary that is kept as part of the
+# sources, against which new code can be checked, generating a warning or
+# error. The hope is that misspellings would trigger this frequently, and rare
+# words rarely, otherwise the burden of updating the dictionary would be too
+# much.
+#
+# And for:
+# ...
+# $ ./gdb/contrib/words.sh -f 1 $(find gdb -type f -name "*.c" -o -name "*.h")
+# ...
+# it generates a list of ~5000 words with frequency 1.
+#
+# This can be used to scan for misspellings manually.
+#
+
+minfreq=
+maxfreq=
+while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
+ case "$1" in
+ --freq|-f)
+ minfreq=$2
+ maxfreq=$2
+ shift 2
+ ;;
+ --min)
+ minfreq=$2
+ if [ "$maxfreq" = "" ]; then
+ maxfreq=0
+ fi
+ shift 2
+ ;;
+ --max)
+ maxfreq=$2
+ if [ "$minfreq" = "" ]; then
+ minfreq=0
+ fi
+ shift 2
+ ;;
+ *)
+ break;
+ ;;
+ esac
+done
+
+if [ "$minfreq" = "" ] && [ "$maxfreq" = "" ]; then
+ minfreq=0
+ maxfreq=0
+fi
+
+awkfile=$(mktemp)
+trap 'rm -f "$awkfile"' EXIT
+
+cat > "$awkfile" <<EOF
+BEGIN {
+ in_comment=0
+}
+
+// {
+ line=\$0
+}
+
+/\/\*/ {
+ in_comment=1
+ sub(/.*\/\*/, "", line)
+}
+
+/\*\// {
+ sub(/\*\/.*/, "", line)
+ in_comment=0
+ print line
+ next
+}
+
+// {
+ if (in_comment) {
+ print line
+ }
+}
+EOF
+
+# Stabilize sort.
+export LC_ALL=C
+
+awk \
+ -f "$awkfile" \
+ -- "$@" \
+ | sed 's/[%^$~#{}`&=@,. \t\/_()|<>\+\*-]/\n/g' \
+ | sed 's/\[/\n/g' \
+ | sed 's/\]/\n/g' \
+ | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*/\n/g' \
+ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \
+ | sed 's/[ \t]*//g' \
+ | sort \
+ | uniq -c \
+ | awk "{ if (($minfreq == 0 || $minfreq <= \$1) \
+ && ($maxfreq == 0 || \$1 <= $maxfreq)) { print \$0; } }" \
+ | awk '{ print length($0) " " $0; }' \
+ | sort -n -r \
+ | cut -d ' ' -f 2-