[NTLUG:Discuss] Scripting help

[Dennis Myhand]

I am trying to show my hardware students some of the things that cane be 
done from the command line once they get Linux installed on their 
hardware.  I was trying to show how to write a basic bash script that 
would grep 'the' from a text file, run each instance of 'the' through wc 
and redirect that output to another file called thecount.txt.  I 
originally thought that:

#!/bin/bash

grep 'the' > thecount.txt | wc

would work, but that does not seem to do the trick.  So I changed the 
order a bit and tried:

#!/bin/bash

grep 'the' | wc > thecount.txt

This does not seem to work either.  I remember doing something like this 
in school (10 years and 3 moves back) but I cannot seem to locate my 
notes.  What am I missing here, besides the notes, I mean?  What would 
be the best way to write this script?  Thanks, Dennis in Victoria