snippetbashTip

sort — Sort lines of text files. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node

Submitted by: @import:tldr-pages·Mar 2, 2026·

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Problem

How to use the sort command: Sort lines of text files. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html>.

Solution

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 {{[-r|--reverse]}} {{path/to/file}}

Sort a file in case-insensitive way:

sort {{[-f|--ignore-case]}} {{path/to/file}}

Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order:

sort {{[-n|--numeric-sort]}} {{path/to/file}}

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

sort {{[-t|--field-separator]}} : {{[-k|--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|--field-separator]}} : {{[-k|--key]}} 3,3n {{[-k|--key]}} 4,4g /etc/passwd

Sort a file preserving only unique lines:

sort {{[-u|--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 {{[-o|--output]}} {{path/to/output_file}} {{path/to/input_file}}

Code Snippets

Sort a file in ascending order

sort {{path/to/file}}

Sort a file in descending order

sort {{[-r|--reverse]}} {{path/to/file}}

Sort a file in case-insensitive way

sort {{[-f|--ignore-case]}} {{path/to/file}}

Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order

sort {{[-n|--numeric-sort]}} {{path/to/file}}

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

sort {{[-t|--field-separator]}} : {{[-k|--key]}} 3n /etc/passwd

Context

tldr-pages: common/sort

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