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Pipelines can be used to sort data based on their counts by first using a tool such as "grep" or "awk" to count the occurrence of each data point. The output of this tool can then be piped into a "sort" command that sorts the output based on the count of each data point.

For example, let's say we have a file called "data.txt" that contains a list of fruits, and we want to sort them based on their count. We can use the following pipeline:

cat data.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

This pipeline first reads the contents of "data.txt" using the "cat" command. Then, it sorts the contents using "sort", which is necessary for the "uniq" command to work properly. The "uniq -c" command counts the occurrence of each fruit and outputs the count and fruit name. Finally, the output is sorted again using "sort -nr", which sorts based on the count in reverse numerical order (-n flag) so that the most common fruit is listed first (-r flag).

The output of this pipeline might look something like:

    5 apple
    3 banana
    2 orange
    1 pear

This shows that "apple" is the most common fruit, followed by "banana", "orange", and "pear".