sort Command

The sort command arranges lines of text in a specified order. It supports alphabetical, numerical, reverse, and custom sorting. sort is one of the fundamental Unix text processing tools, often combined with uniq, head, and other commands in pipelines.

sort can handle multiple sort keys, allowing you to sort by different columns with different criteria. It supports human-readable number sorting (1K, 2M, 3G), version number sorting, and month sorting. It can also remove duplicates while sorting.

For large files, sort automatically uses temporary files and can be configured for parallel sorting on multi-core systems. It is stable by default on most Linux systems, meaning equal elements maintain their original order.

Option	Description	Example
-n	Sort numerically instead of alphabetically	sort -n numbers.txt
-r	Reverse the sort order	sort -rn scores.txt
-k	Sort by specific field (column)	sort -k2 -n data.txt
-t	Set field delimiter	sort -t',' -k3 -n data.csv
-u	Remove duplicate lines (unique)	sort -u names.txt
-h	Sort human-readable numbers (1K, 2M, 3G)	du -sh * | sort -h
-f	Case-insensitive sort	sort -f names.txt
-V	Version number sort	sort -V versions.txt
-o	Write result to file (can be the same file)	sort -o sorted.txt unsorted.txt