title: Bash Sort
Bash Sort
Sort is one a simple and useful command which will rearrange the lines in a text file so that they are sorted, numerically and alphabetically. There are by default the following rules for sorting text:
- numbers will appear befor a letter
- letter that appears earlier in the alphabet will appear before a letter that appears later in the alphabet
- lowercase letters will appear before lines with the same letter in uppercase
The default rules of sorting can be changes by the options you provice to the command.
Usage
sort [options] [file_names]
Most used options:
-b
, ignore leading blanks.-f
, fold lower case to upper case characters.-h
, compare human readable numbers (e.g., â2Kâ, â1Gâ).-r
, reverse the result of comparisons.-R
, sort in a random order
Example
We have a file data.txt, which contains the following text:
apples oranges pears kiwis bananas
To sort the lines in the file alphabetically, use the following command:
sort data.txt
which will produce the following output:
apples bananas kiwis oranges pears
To reverse the sorting order, we using the -r
flag.
sort -r data.txt
which will produce the following output:
pears oranges kiwis bananas apples
More Information:
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_(Unix)