show a specific line from a command output Linux script shell

Question

I want to find the file with the biggest number of words in a directory so I tried to use just the second line from the output of this command :

wc * -w | sort -nr

In fact I know that it will work if i saved the output to a file and used the command sed like this :

wc * -w | sort -nr >> file
sed -n "2p" file

but this is not what I want , I need to do it via the output of the command directly

I tried with a script shell like :

for i in `wc * -w | sort -nr`
do
if test $i -eq 2 then
echo "$i"
fi
done

but it was not what I expected Thank you in advance.

That is actually working but I'm trying to find out if there is anyway to do it without using sed command — Hamzaoui, May 25 '14 at 13:40
What tools are you willing to use? *What are you trying to do?* — Beta, May 25 '14 at 20:25
I want to write a script shell that shows the name of file with the biggest number of words in the current directory — Hamzaoui, May 25 '14 at 21:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 25 '14 at 23:42

0

find -type f -exec wc -w {} + | sort -nr | awk NR==2

answered May 25 '14 at 23:42

Zombo

1 Answers1