sort Command Examples

Sort lines of text files. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/sort.

• Sort a file in ascending order:

sort {{path/to/file}}

• Sort a file in descending order:

sort --reverse {{path/to/file}}

• Sort a file in case-insensitive way:

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

• Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order:

sort --numeric-sort {{path/to/file}}

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

sort --field-separator={{:}} --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 {{:}} -k {{3,3n}} -k {{4,4g}} {{/etc/passwd}}

• Sort a file preserving only unique lines:

sort --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 --output={{path/to/file}} {{path/to/file}}