Linux commands: sort

By Flavio Copes

Learn how the Linux sort command orders the lines of a file or piped input, with -r to reverse, -n for numeric order, and -u to drop duplicate lines.

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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