Let's say you have an list named fruit that contains the following values.

fruit=(banana apple orange apple grapes)

A for loop can be used to iterate over each item in the list, like this.

for myFruit in ${fruit[@]}; do
  echo $myFruit
done

Which should return the following. Notice the list is NOT sorted alphabetically.

banana
apple
orange
apple
grape

Here is how you can sort the list alphabetically.

IFS=$'\n'
fruit=($(sort <<<"${fruit[*]}"))
unset IFS

A for loop can be used to iterate over each item in the list.

for myFruit in ${sorted[@]}; do
  echo $myFruit
done

Which should return the following. Notice that the output is now sorted alphabetically.

apple
apple
banana
grape
orange

Notice apple is listed twice. The -u or --uniq flag can be included to only return unique values.

fruit=($(sort --uniq <<<"${fruit[*]}"))

Let's say you have an list that containers numbers (integers).

foo=(1 0 17 5)

In this scenario, you will want to include the -n or --numeric-sort to sort the list numerically.

IFS=$'\n'
fruit=($(sort --numeric-sort <<<"${fruit[*]}"))
unset IFS

Here is how you can sort a list that contains IP addresses.

ip_array=("192.168.1.10" "10.0.0.1" "192.168.1.2" "172.16.0.1" "10.0.0.100")

sorted_ips=($(printf "%s\n" "${ip_array[@]}" | sort -t . -n -k 1,1 -k 2,2 -k 3,3 -k 4,4))

for ip in "${sorted_ips[@]}"; do
  echo "$ip"
done