Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello, I'm trying to create a script that sorts documents by author (found in file name) and then create a directory for that author. For example,

Input:
John - Paper_1.txt
John - Paper_2.txt
Mark - Paper_1.txt
Jill - Paper_1.txt

Output:
dir/John/Paper_1.txt
dir/John/Paper_2.txt
dir/Mark/Paper_1.txt
dir/Jill/Paper_1.txt


I have the following code, but the directories are named very strangely (possibly because of the sort feature I used).

Right now, the code creates directories with the following names:
dir/John Mark Jill/Paper_1.txt
dir/John Mark Jill/Paper_2.txt
dir/Mark Jill/Paper_1.txt
dir/Jill/Paper_1.txt

Can anyone help?

---------- Post updated at 07:33 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:02 PM ----------

As another route, I know that I can create the directories first, by using

Code:

 mkdir $(ls *txt | cut -d - -f1 | sort -u)

but then the issue of sorting the files arises.

Any suggestions?

please try this:

Code:

for file in *.txt
do
 dir=$(echo "$file" | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
 mkdir -p $dir
 mv "$file" $dir
done