Yes and no: yes, in principle you could have done that. But you said you wanted to sort the files first, which is why i came up with the idea of the intermediate file, in which you could have sorted....
Again: all these devices in scripts work (at least in principle) on the command line too and everything you write on teh commandline could come from a script. In fact every shell is...
Scripting is nothing else than command line. You could every program written here cut-&-paste to the command line and it would work. On the other hand you could paste any command line content to a...
No. alister is creating a list of values which he supposes to correspond to directory- and filenames. This is because of the way you laid out the problem in your previous posts.