LINUX COMMAND ATLAS · COMMAND GUIDE

Linux sort command

Sort lines of text. Add -n for numeric order or -r for reverse order.

GNU Coreutils

Syntax

Command form

sort [OPTION]... [FILE]...

7 options

Option	What it does
`-n, --numeric-sort`	Compare according to string numerical value.
`-r, --reverse`	Reverse the result of comparisons.
`-u, --unique`	Output only the first of equal lines.
`-k, --key=KEYDEF`	Sort by a selected field or character range.
`-t, --field-separator=SEP`	Use SEP instead of whitespace between fields.
`-h, --human-numeric-sort`	Compare human-readable numbers such as 2K and 1G.
`-f, --ignore-case`	Fold lowercase letters to uppercase for comparison.

2 examples

Sort lines of text. Add -n for numeric order or -r for reverse order.

sort -n scores.txt

Sort colon-separated records by their third field numerically.

sort -t: -k3,3n /etc/passwd

Locale affects collation. For reproducible byte-oriented ordering, set LC_ALL=C; use -o when writing output to the input file.