Linux commands: sort
A quick guide to the `sort` command, used to sort records/lines of text
Suppose you have a text file which contains the names of dogs:
This list is unordered.
The sort
command helps us sorting them by name:
Use the r
option to reverse the order:
Sorting by default is case sensitive, and alphabetic. Use the --ignore-case
option to sort case insensitive, and the -n
option to sort using a numeric order.
If the file contains duplicate lines:
You can use the -u
option to remove them:
sort
does not just works on files, as many UNIX commands it also works with pipes, so you can use on the output of another command, for example you can order the files returned by ls
with:
ls | sort
sort
is very powerful and has lots more options, which you can explore calling man sort
.
The sort
command works on Linux, macOS, WSL, and anywhere you have a UNIX environment
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