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sort — sort lines

cheat sheet · Ubuntu 24.04 · GNU coreutils 9.4 https://lab.dimsanych.ru/en/wiki/sort/

Cheat sheet

sort file.txt alphabetical order
sort -n nums.txt as numbers: 2 9 10 100
sort -rn nums.txt numbers, largest first
sort -k2,2 table.txt by the second field
sort -t: -k3,3n /etc/passwd ":" separator, field 3
sort -u names.txt sort and drop duplicates
du -sh /var/log/* | sort -h sizes 4K 512M 1G
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn line frequency, most common first

Options

Order letters can be attached to a key: -k3,3n is field 3 as a number, -k2,2r is field 2 in reverse. The full list is in man sort.