Linux commands: sort

Suppose you have a text file which contains the names of dogs:

This list is unordered.

The sort command sorts them by name:

Use the -r option to reverse the order:

The order depends on your locale. With the C locale (LC_ALL=C sort) uppercase letters come before lowercase (byte order). In a UTF-8 locale like en_US.UTF-8, GNU sort uses a dictionary-like collation that mixes cases. Use -f (or --ignore-case) to ignore case.

Say scores.txt has:

10
2
1

Without -n, sort compares the text. 10 comes before 2, because 1 is before 2:

sort scores.txt

1
10
2

sort -n scores.txt

1
2
10

If the file contains duplicate lines:

You can use the -u option to remove them. uniq does the same on already-sorted input:

sort doesn’t just work on files. Like many UNIX commands it also works with pipes, so you can use it 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

If you have a list in your clipboard and want to sort or dedupe it without the terminal, I built a free line sorter that does both in the browser.

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