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sort unix wikipedia jump to content main menu main menu move to sidebar hide navigation main page contents current events random article about wikipedia contact us contribute help learn to edit community portal recent changes upload file special pages search search appearance donate create account log in personal tools donate create account log in contents move to sidebar hide top 1 history toggle history subsection 1 1 non posix ports 2 syntax toggle syntax subsection 2 1 parameters 3 examples toggle examples subsection 3 1 sort a file in alphabetical order 3 2 sort by number 3 3 columns or fields 3 4 sort on multiple fields 3 5 sorting a pipe delimited file 3 6 sorting a tab delimited file 3 7 sort in reverse 3 8 sort in random 3 9 sort by version 4 see also 5 references 6 further reading 7 external links toggle the table of contents sort unix 18 languages беларуская čeština deutsch español français עברית magyar italiano 日本語 한국어 latviešu polski português română русский српски srpski türkçe українська edit links article talk english read edit view history tools tools move to sidebar hide actions read edit view history general what links here related changes upload file permanent link page information cite this page get shortened url switch to legacy parser print export download as pdf printable version in other projects wikidata item appearance move to sidebar hide from wikipedia the free encyclopedia standard unix utility sort the sort command original author ken thompson at t bell laboratories developers various open source and commercial developers release november 3 1971 54 years ago 1971 11 03 written in c operating system multics unix unix like v plan 9 inferno msx dos ibm i platform cross platform type command license coreutils gplv3 plan 9 mit license in computing sort is a standard command line program of unix and unix like operating systems that prints the lines of its input or concatenation of all files listed in its argument list in sorted order sorting is done based on one or more sort keys extracted from each line of input by default the entire input is taken as sort key blank space is the default field separator the command supports a number of command line options that can vary by implementation for instance the r flag will reverse the sort order sort ordering is affected by the environment s locale settings 1 history edit a sort command that invokes a general sort facility was first implemented within multics 2 later it appeared in version 1 unix this version was originally written by ken thompson at at t bell laboratories by version 4 thompson had modified it to use pipes but sort retained an option to name the output file because it was used to sort a file in place in version 5 thompson invented to represent standard input 3 sort is part of x open portability guide issue 2 1987 from there it was inherited into posix 4 the version of sort bundled in gnu coreutils was written by mike haertel and paul eggert 1 this implementation employs the mergesort algorithm it offers an option to sort in parallel though performance gain diminishes after 8 threads 5 gnu parallel also provides a wrapper to perform parallel invocations of sort with similar performance gain characteristics on a 48 core system the speedup is about 3 6 the sort command has also been ported to the ibm i operating system being accessible from the posix compatible qshell 7 non posix ports edit similar commands are available on many other operating systems for example a sort command is part of ascii s msx dos2 tools for msx dos version 2 8 the uutils project provides a cross platform implementation of sort written in rust with support for all of gnu coreutil s options it uses the par_sort_by or par_sort_unstable_by function of rayon the rust multi threading library implementing either an adaptive mergesort inspired by timsort or a variation of pattern defeating quicksort 9 syntax edit sort option file with no file or when file is the command reads from standard input parameters edit in the table below short indicates only support for the one letter short form of the option long options are originally a gnu extension and is not part of any version of sus or posix it has since also been adopted by freebsd name description sus posix plan 9 inferno freebsd linux msx dos ibm i b ignore leading blanks roignores leading blanks short short no yes yes no short c check check that input file is sorted no short no yes yes no short c check silent quiet like c but does not report the first bad line no no no yes yes no no d dictionary order considers only blanks and alphanumeric characters short short no yes yes no short f ignore case fold lower case to upper case characters short short no yes yes no short g general numeric sort sort general numeric compares according to general numerical value short short no yes yes no no h human numeric sort sort human numeric compare human readable numbers e g 2k 1g short no no yes yes no no i ignore nonprinting considers only printable characters short short no yes yes no short k key pos1 pos2 start a key at pos1 origin 1 end it at pos2 default end of line no no no yes yes no no m merge only input files are assumed to be presorted no short no yes yes no short m month sort sort month compares unknown jan dec short short no yes yes no no n numeric sort sort numeric compares according to string numerical value short short short yes yes no short o output uses output file instead of standard output no short no yes yes no short r reverse reverses the result of comparisons short short short yes yes no short r random sort sort random shuffles but groups identical keys see also shuf no no no yes yes no no s stabilizes sort by disabling last resort comparison no no no yes yes no no s size buffer size size use size for the maximum size of the memory buffer no no no yes no no no t char field separator char uses char instead of non blank to blank transition in other words tab character separating fields is char no short no yes yes no short t dir temporary directory dir uses dir for temporaries no short no yes yes no no u unique unique processing to suppress all but one in each set of lines having equal keys no short no yes yes no short v version sort natural sort of version numbers within text no no no yes yes no no w like i but ignore only tabs and spaces no yes no no no no no z zero terminated end lines with 0 byte not newline no no no yes yes no no help display help and exit no no no yes yes no no version output version information and exit no no no yes yes no no r reverses the result of comparisons no no no no no yes no s specify the number of digits to determine how many digits of each line should be judged no no no no no yes no a sort by ascii code no no no no no yes no h include hidden files when using wild cards no no no no no yes no examples edit sort a file in alphabetical order edit cat phonebook smith brett 555 4321 doe john 555 1234 doe jane 555 3214 avery cory 555 4132 fogarty suzie 555 2314 sort phonebook avery cory 555 4132 doe jane 555 3214 doe john 555 1234 fogarty suzie 555 2314 smith brett 555 4321 sort by number edit the n option makes the program sort according to numerical value the du command produces output that starts with a number the file size so its output can be piped to sort to produce a list of files sorted by ascending file size du bin sort n 4 bin domainname 24 bin ls 102 bin sh 304 bin csh the find command with the ls option prints file sizes in the 7th field so a list of the latex files sorted by file size is produced by find name tex ls sort k 7n columns or fields edit use the k option to sort on a certain column for example use k 2 to sort on the second column in old versions of sort the 1 option made the program sort on the second column of data 2 for the third etc this usage is deprecated cat zipcode adam 12345 bob 34567 joe 56789 sam 45678 wendy 23456 sort k 2n zipcode adam 12345 wendy 23456 bob 34567 sam 45678 joe 56789 sort on multiple fields edit the k m n option lets you sort on a key that is potentially composed of multiple fields start at column m end at column n cat quota fred 2000 bob 1000 an 1000 chad 1000 don 1500 eric 500 sort k2 2n k1 1 quota eric 500 an 1000 bob 1000 chad 1000 don 1500 fred 2000 here the first sort is done using column 2 k2 2n specifies sorting on the key starting and ending with column 2 and sorting numerically if k2 is used instead the sort key would begin at column 2 and extend to the end of the line spanning all the fields in between k1 1 dictates breaking ties using the value in column 1 sorting alphabetically by default note that bob and chad have the same quota and are sorted alphabetically in the final output sorting a pipe delimited file edit sort k2 2 k1 1 t zipcode adam 12345 wendy 23456 sam 45678 joe 56789 bob 34567 sorting a tab delimited file edit sorting a file with tab separated values requires a tab character to be specified as the column delimiter this illustration uses the shell s dollar quote notation 10 11 to specify the tab as a c escape sequence sort k2 2 t t phonebook doe john 555 1234 fogarty suzie 555 2314 doe jane 555 3214 avery cory 555 4132 smith brett 555 4321 sort in reverse edit the r option just reverses the order of the sort sort rk 2n zipcode joe 56789 sam 45678 bob 34567 wendy 23456 adam 12345 sort in random edit the gnu implementation has a r random sort option based on hashing this is not a full random shuffle because it will sort identical lines together a true random sort is provided by the unix utility shuf sort by version edit the gnu implementation has a v version sort option which is a natural sort of version numbers within text two text strings that are to be compared are split into blocks of letters and blocks of digits blocks of letters are compared alpha numerically and blocks of digits are compared numerically i e skipping leading zeros more digits means larger otherwise the leftmost digits that differ determine the result blocks are compared left to right and the first non equal block in that loop decides which text is larger this happens to work for ip addresses debian package version strings and similar tasks where numbers of variable length are embedded in strings see also edit collation list of unix commands uniq shuf join unix references edit 1 2 sort 1 linux user manual user commands from manned org multics commands www multicians org mcilroy m d 1987 a research unix reader annotated excerpts from the programmer s manual 1971 1986 pdf technical report cstr bell labs 139 sort shell and utilities reference the single unix specification version 5 from the open group sort invocation gnu coreutils 9 8 name gnu parallel 20250922 documentation www gnu org ibm ibm system i version 7 2 programming qshell pdf ibm retrieved 2020 09 05 msx dos2 tools user s manual msx dos2 tools ユーザーズマニュアル april 1 1993 via internet archive parallelslicemut in rayon slice rust docs rs the gnu bash reference manual for bash version 4 2 section 3 1 2 4 ansi c quoting free software foundation inc 28 december 2010 retrieved 1 february 2013 words of the form string are treated specially the word expands to string with backslash escaped characters replaced as specified by the ansi c standard fowler glenn s korn david g vo kiem phong kornshell faq archived from the original on 2013 05 27 retrieved 3 march 2015 the string literal syntax was added to ksh93 to solve the problem of entering special characters in scripts it uses ansi c rules to translate the string between the further reading edit shotts jr william e 2012 the linux command line a complete introduction no starch press isbn 978 1593273897 mcelhearn kirk 2006 the mac os x command line unix under the hood john wiley sons isbn 978 0470113851 external links edit the wikibook guide to unix has a page on the topic of commands original sort manpage the original bsd unix program s manpage sort 1 linux user manual user commands from manned org sort 1 plan 9 programmer s manual volume 1 sort 1 inferno general commands manual further details about sort at softpanorama v t e unix command line utilities and shell builtins file system cat chattr chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fuser ln ls mkdir mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask processes at bg crontab fg kill nice ps time user environment env exit logname mesg talk tput uname who write text processing awk basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fold head iconv join m4 more nl paste patch printf read sed sort strings tail tr troff uniq vi wc xargs shell builtins alias cd echo test unset wait searching find grep documentation man software development ar ctags lex make nm strip yacc miscellaneous bc cal dc expr lp od sleep true and false categories standard unix programs unix sus2008 utilities list v t e plan 9 command line interface programs and shell builtins file system chmod chgrp cmp cp dd du file gzip ls mkdir pwd rm split tee touch processes kill ps user environment passwd who text processing awk basename comm diff ed eqn join sed sort spell strings tail tr troff uniq wc shell builtins echo test networking ip ipconfig ip ping netstat searching grep software development ar hoc lex nm strip yacc miscellaneous bc cal fortune sleep category v t e gnu core utilities command line interface programs file system chcon chmod chown chgrp cksum cp dd df dir dircolors install ln ls mkdir mkfifo mknod mktemp mv realpath rm rmdir shred sync touch truncate vdir text utilities b2sum base32 base64 cat cksum comm csplit cut expand fmt fold head join md5sum nl numfmt od paste ptx pr sha1sum shuf sort split sum tac tail tr tsort unexpand uniq wc shell utilities arch basename chroot date dirname du echo env expr factor false groups hostid id link logname nice nohup nproc pathchk pinky printenv printf pwd readlink runcon seq sleep stat stdbuf stty tee test timeout true tty uname unlink uptime users who whoami yes 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