Bash sort

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., “2K”, “1G”).
• -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)