How to tell if two strings of any length are anagrams using bash, awk or any using command or script?

Question

The string or word can be of any length.

Eg "William Shakespeare" = "I am a weakish speller" both are anagrams

E.g. "Madam Curie" = "Radium came"

Answer 1

This may work for you:

# function to cleanup a given argument by doing this:
# 1. Remove all alphanumerics
# 2. Convert to all lowercasing all characters 
# 3. Sorting all characters
# 4. Stripping all newlines 
prep() {
   fold -w1 <<< "${1//[^[:alnum:]]/}" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sort | tr -d '\n'
}

# function to check if given 2 arguments are anagrams
isAnagram() {
   a=$(prep "$1")
   b=$(prep "$2")
   [[ $a = $b ]] && echo "yes" || echo "no";
}

To call them use:

isAnagram "William Shakespeare" "I am a weakish speller"
yes

isAnagram "Madam Curie" "Radium came"
yes

isAnagram "cat" "act"
yes

isAnagram "cat" "cot"
no