tldr/pages/common/sort.md

sort

Sort lines of text files.

• Sort a file in ascending order:

sort {{filename}}

• Sort a file in descending order:

sort -r {{filename}}

• Sort a file in case-insensitive way:

sort --ignore-case {{filename}}

• Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order:

sort -n {{filename}}

• Sort the passwd file by the 3rd field, numerically:

sort -t: -k 3n /etc/passwd

• Sort a file preserving only unique lines:

sort -u {{filename}}

• Sort human-readable numbers (in this case the 5th field of ls -lh):

ls -lh | sort -h -k 5