Sort

lastmod 2024-06-26created 2020-07-316 edits

sort or merge records (lines) of text and binary files

Options

--reverse, -r

Sort in reverse order.

--key N, -kN

Index of the Column to sort by

• Mainly used to sort by file name with commands such as sha256sum. (e.g. sha256sum * | sort -k2)

--numeric-sort, -n

Sort numerically.

Sorting without options gives 1, 10, 11, ..., 19, 2, 20, 21, ..., 29, 3, 30, .... (ASCII code order) This changes it to 1, 2, 3, ....

-V, --version-sort

natural sort of (version) numbers within text

Similar to --numeric-sort above, but also works with input where numbers are mixed into ordinary text

See also

• uniq