Sorting Output

The sort command

The sort command can sort output alphabetically or numerically. Not every program sorts its output, but we can pipe the output to sort when needed.

Remember the words.txt file we created earlier? Let’s use sort to sort the lines of the file alphabetically:

$ sort words.txt

Run the complete code on the terminal below for practice.

cat << 'EOF' > words.txt 
blue
apple
candy
hand
fork
EOF
sort words.txt

We can use the -r switch to sort the file in reverse with the following code: sort -r words.txt.

We can use the -R flag to sort the lines randomly with the following code: sort -R words.txt.

Like with other programs, we can use sort in a pipeline, which means we can use it to sort the output of another command.

The same switches apply to numeric inputs.

Use the terminal below for practice.