sort Command Examples

Sort lines of text files. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html.

• Sort a file in ascending order:

sort {{path/to/file}}

• Sort a file in descending order:

sort {{[-r|--reverse]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Sort a file in case-insensitive way:

sort {{-f|--ignore-case}} {{path/to/file}}

• Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order:

sort {{[-n|--numeric-sort]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Sort /etc/passwd by the 3rd field of each line numerically, using ":" as a field separator:

sort {{[-t|--field-separator]}} {{:}} {{[-k|--key]}} {{3n}} {{/etc/passwd}}

• As above, but when items in the 3rd field are equal, sort by the 4th field by numbers with exponents:

sort {{[-t|--field-separator]}} {{:}} {{[-k|--key]}} {{3,3n}} {{[-k|--key]}} {{4,4g}} {{/etc/passwd}}

• Sort a file preserving only unique lines:

sort {{[-u|--unique]}} {{path/to/file}}

• Sort a file, printing the output to the specified output file (can be used to sort a file in-place):

sort {{[-o|--output]}} {{path/to/file}} {{path/to/file}}