sort

Additional Notes

sort orders lines of text. It is often used with pipelines to organize command output, logs, lists, and reports.

Sorting can be alphabetical, numeric, reverse, human-readable size aware, or based on a field.

Syntax

sort [options] [file...]

Parameters

• options: Flags that change how sort behaves.
• file: Text file to read or process.

Common Options

• -n, --numeric-sort: Sort numbers by numeric value.
• -h, --human-numeric-sort: Sort human-readable sizes like 2K, 10M, 1G.
• -r, --reverse: Reverse order.
• -u, --unique: Remove duplicate lines after sorting.
• -k N: Sort by field/key.
• -t SEP: Use a field separator.
• -o FILE: Write output to a file.

Examples

sort names.txt

Sort lines alphabetically.

sort -n numbers.txt

Sort numbers correctly.

sort -r names.txt

Sort in reverse order.

du -sh * | sort -h

Sort disk usage by human-readable size.

sort -u words.txt

Sort and remove duplicates.

sort -t: -k3 -n /etc/passwd

Sort /etc/passwd by numeric UID field.

Practical Notes

• Use sort -n for plain numbers; normal sort compares text.
• Use sort -h for sizes from commands like du -h.
• uniq usually needs sorted input to remove all duplicates.
• Use LC_ALL=C sort for faster byte-based sorting in some scripts.