Sort Output of Loop and Display

Question

I have a script that loops through a directory and for each file counts the iterations of a certain word. When the script is run the number of iterations is output to the screen for each file. I however would like to first sort the list before it's output.

I know I need to output to sort somewhere, but I'm not sure how to implement this. In a non scripting language I would probably put the output of the loop into an array, but I don't think that's what's meant to be done with Bash.

for f in /home/reviews_folder/*
do
    tr -s ' ' '\n' < $f | grep - c '<Author>'
done

I don't think I would put the sort in the loop, so how would i create a pipeline between the loop and the sort?

Answer 1

A loop is a compound command, and each command in the body of the loop inherits its standard output from the loop. That means you can simply pipe the loop itself to sort.

for f in /home/reviews_folder/*; do
  tr -s ' ' '\n' < "$f" | grep -c '<Author>'
done | sort