tldr/pages/common/sort.md

sort

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 {{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 -n {{path/to/file}}

• Sort the passwd file by the 3rd field, numerically:

sort -t: -k 3n /etc/passwd

• Sort a file preserving only unique lines:

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

• Sort human-readable numbers (in this case the 5th field of ls -lh):

ls -lh | sort -h -k 5

• Sort numbers with exponents:

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