How to sort data while printing line by line in Bash

Question

I'm writing a shell script traversing a list of directories and counting words from files inside them. The code prints data each time I read a file. So the output is not sorted. How can I sort it?

The output right now is like this:

cat 5
door 1
bird 3
dog 1

and I want to sort it first by second column and then by first column:

dog 1
door 1
bird 3
cat 5

Answer 1

You can pipe your shell script to:

sort -n -k2 -k1

With -n you specify numeric sort and with -k2 that you want to sort first by the second field and with -k1 to sort then by first field.

Answer 2

First of all, I tried to reproduce what OP is doing, so after creating the files, I tried this command:

% for i in *; do echo -n "$i "; wc -w < $i; done
bird 3
cat 5
dog 1
door 1

Then I have added the sort:

 % (for i in *; do echo -n "$i "; wc -w < $i; done) | sort -n -k 2 -k 1    
dog 1
door 1
bird 3
cat 5