Question

I have a list of data that I need to analyze. The first thing I do is check whether the file is indeed the one I want, then I sort the data according to the 4th column, and then I need to manually order the sorted line.

For example, I need to print the 3rd word in the line, and then the first word etc.
Here is what I wrote:
mainScript :

#!/bin/bash
for file in `ls ${1}` ; do
    if [[ ! ($file = *.user) ]] ; then
        continue
    fi

    sort -nrk4 $file | source printer_script

done

printer_script :

#!/bin/bash
echo $3
echo $1
echo $2

Why nothing gets printed even though I send the sorted lines by pipeline?

Answer 1

Because with the pipe the output of sort goes to the standard input of your script, and in it instead you are looking at the parameters; if you want to grab that output and pass it as parameters, you should do:

./printer_script $(sort -nrk4 $file)