How can I optimize my Bash script that uses 'find' for processing large file lists?

I'm working on a Bash script that processes a huge number of files, specifically those named "output*.txt". The script currently removes an old result file and then uses the 'find' command to execute a series of commands on each file. My goal is to extract the 6th last and 3rd last line from each file, grabbing the second column from these lines (which is always an integer). However, the current approach creates a new shell for each file, which seems to slow things down. I'm curious if there's a way to improve the performance by loading the file list into a variable, or perhaps using a loop instead of 'find -exec'. Although it only takes about a minute to run, I'm looking for ways to streamline this process. Here's the relevant script: #!/usr/bin/bash rm -fv plot.dat find . -iname "output*.txt" -exec sh -c ' BASE=$(tail -6 < {} | head -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 2) FAKE=$(tail -3 > plot.dat ' {} ; sort -k1 -n < plot.dat echo "All done"