Wow, thanks everyone for your responses! Sorry for not getting back to
you sooner about my trials and tribulations with this question (not to
mention the rest of them).

I hope no one is offended when I say I have no clue what many of you
were referring to, however, I was able to pull some information from
your responses, such as wc, a head command, etc.

My lab partners and I came up with the following mess (I'm embarassed
because it doesn't even work right, but we were on a deadline and this
was as close as we got:

:~$ rgrep -s -i -c ubuntu /etc/ | awk -F: '{print $2 "\t" $1}' | sort
-rn | head -n5 | awk '{print $2}'

Now, this command never succesfully worked as far as I saw, my shell
window just sorta sat there and did nothing, so I am not sure if it was
trying to interpret the command or didn't like it. However, when we
tried it using a different (and smaller directory), the command line
worked, as seen below.

~$ rgrep -s -i -c ubuntu /etc/apt | awk -F: '{print $2 "\t" $1}' | sort
-rn | head -n5
15 /etc/apt/sources.list
2 /etc/apt/trusted.gpg~
2 /etc/apt/trusted.gpg
2 /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
0 /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

:~$ rgrep -s -i -c ubuntu /etc/apt | awk -F: '{print $2 "\t" $1}' |
sort -rn | head -n5 | awk '{print $2}'
/etc/apt/sources.list
/etc/apt/trusted.gpg~
/etc/apt/trusted.gpg
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

So, there you have it, the fruit of our labors! I am sure ther are more
effcient ways of doing this...specifically the professor mentioned
piping to grep two times, but I think it is obvious, we never figured
that particular method out.

I really appreciate eveyone's input, thanks again!
D