<[Brent]> Cool!  What's it supposed to output?  On this BSD box, I get something like:

 *
 taff   ************
 taff  1*****

<[Brennen]> A sample of my output:

 Dec  1 ****
 Dec  2 *************************
 Dec  3 ************
 Dec  4 *****************************
 Dec  5 ********
 Dec  6 ****************
 Dec  7 *********************
 Dec  8 *********
 Dec  9 *************
 Dec 10 ***************************
 Dec 11 ************
 Dec 12 ******************
 Dec 13 ********************
 Dec 14 ***********************
 Dec 15 *****************
 Dec 16 *************

Which is a frequency plot of change dates for every file in the current directory, more or less.

I would be surprised if it was portable. The options to cut(1) probably break, to begin with.

(Updated entry.)

<[Brent]> Ah-ha!  Yep, the problem lay in the options to cut(1).  I changed it to c38-44 on my Mac, and it worked as described.  Nifty!


<[Brennen]> I'm entirely certain there're better ways to do the first bit than the contortions with ls(1). This might be a way to start - get the ctime formatted as a date from stat(1):

 stat -c %z * | cut -f1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c

Or maybe this:

 find -maxdepth 1 -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td\n' | sort | uniq -c