better way to do this in python

[Mag Gam]

I have a file like this,


cat file
aaa
bbb
aaa
aaa
aaa

awk '{x[$1]++}END { for (i in x) {print i,x} } ' 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?