MUCH faster, thanks.

Now I'm piping that into Perl to convert the counts to percentages. If I figure out a one-liner for that I'll let you know.

Next I'll be tempted to write a module for generating "realistic" (Benford-compliant) random numbers using this concise specification from HN contributor "shrughes":

"Data whose logarithm is uniformly distributed does [follow Benford's Law]."

I could use that to produce demo or test data.