Longest words spellable with alphabet blocks minus a word

alphabet_minus_word.sh

# We own a set of alphabet blocks. There are 24 of them: one letter on each
# (with drawings of things that start with that letter), and X, Y, and Z are all
# on one block. We took the letters for our daughters name (no repeats, phew!)
# and they sit on a shelf in her room. The rest are with her toys in the living
# room.
#
# Here's how I figured out the longest words I could spell with the remaining
# blocks (buchwald, plutarch, abruptly, upwardly, watchful, and wrathful).

cat $WORDFILE |                   # Replace with a word file on your machine, probably one in /usr/share/dict/  \
    tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |          # Convert all to lowercase \
    grep -v '[removedword]' |     # Remove words that contain the letters from a word \
    grep -v '\(.\).*\1' |         # Remove words with one letter more than once \
    grep -v '[xyz].*[xyz]' |      # Remove words with more than one of [xyz] \
    awk '{ print length, $0 }' | sort -n -s -r | cut -d" " -f2- |   # Sort by length \
    head -20                      # Just show the top 20