sort

Sort lines of text files. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html.

• Sort a file in ascending order:

sort path/to/file

• Sort a file in descending order:

sort --reverse path/to/file

• Sort a file in case-insensitive way:

sort --ignore-case path/to/file

• Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order:

sort --numeric-sort path/to/file

• Sort /etc/passwd by the 3rd field of each line numerically, using ":" as a field separator:

sort --field-separator=: --key=3n /etc/passwd

• As above, but when items in the 3rd field are equal, sort by the 4th field by numbers with exponents:

sort -t : -k 3,3n -k 4,4g /etc/passwd

• Sort a file preserving only unique lines:

sort --unique path/to/file

• Sort a file, printing the output to the specified output file (can be used to sort a file in-place):

sort --output=path/to/file path/to/file