Usages of sort

The command sort‘s job is how it is literally understood.

Some useful options are listed below. For rarer usages, just go for manual page.

• -t: Specifies the delimiter separating each line into columns
• -k: Denotes by which column to sort.
  • -n: Enable numeric sorting in place of lexicographical sorting the default behavior.
• -r: Reverse, that is, do descending sorting.

Given a csv file test.txt:

China,5
Chinese,7
Chile,5
Unknown,7
Brazil,6
DontknowEither,14
America,7
English,7

The first column is the word, the second column is the number of letters the word consists of.

To sort by the first column descending and lexicographically, use command sort -k 1 -t ',' -r test.txt or sort -r test.txt. Then you’ll get the result:

Unknown,7
English,7
DontknowEither,14
Chinese,7
China,5
Chile,5
Brazil,6
America,7

And to sort by the number of the letters consisting of the word, execute this command: sort -k 2 -n -t ',' test.txt. Then it prints the result:

Chile,5
China,5
Brazil,6
America,7
Chinese,7
English,7
Unknown,7
DontknowEither,14

Application of sort may save you a bunch of time in shell scripting especially when dealing with forms and tables. You have to master it if you script.

bash, linux, shell, sort — Mar 1, 2019