better way to do this in python

Sat Apr 2 19:58:09 EDT 2011

I have a file like this,
cat file
aaa
bbb
aaa
aaa
aaa
awk '{x[1ドル]++}END { for (i in x) {print i,x[i]} } ' test
bbb 1
aaa 4
I suppose I can do something like this.
(pseudocode)
d={}
try:
 d[key]+=1
except KeyError:
 d[key]=1
I was wondering if there is a pythonic way of doing this? I plan on
doing this many times for various files. Would the python collections
class be sufficient?