SORT(1) General Commands Manual SORT(1) NAME sort - sort or merge files SYNTAX sort [ -mubdfinrt_________x ] [ +pos1 [ -pos2 ] ] [ -o name ] [ -T direc- tory ] [ files ] DESCRIPTION Sort sorts lines of all the named files together and writes the result on the standard output. If no input files are named, the standard input is sorted. The name "-" also means read input from standard input. The default sort key is an entire line. Default ordering is lexicographic by bytes in the machine collating sequence. The ordering is affected glob- ally by the following options, one or more of which may appear. b Ignore leading blanks (spaces and tabs) in field comparisons. d `Dictionary' order: only letters, digits and blanks are significant in comparisons. f Fold upper case letters onto lower case. i Ignore characters outside the ASCII range (040-0176) in nonnumeric comparisons. n An initial numeric string, consisting of optional blanks, optional mi- nus sign, and zero or more digits with optional decimal point, is sorted by arithmetic value. Option n implies option b. r Reverse the sense of comparisons. tx `Tab character' separating fields is x. The notation +pos1 -pos2 restricts a sort key to a field beginning at pos1 and ending just before pos2. pos1 and pos2 each have the form m.n, option- ally followed by one or more of the flags bdfinr, where m tells a number of fields to skip from the beginning of the line and n tells a number of char- acters to skip further. If any flags are present they override all the global ordering options for this key. If the b option is in effect n is counted from the first nonblank in the field; b is attached independently to pos2. A missing .n means .0; a missing -pos2 means the end of the line. Under the -tx option, fields are strings separated by x; otherwise fields are nonempty nonblank strings separated by blanks. When there are multiple sort keys, later keys are compared only after all earlier keys compare equal. Lines that otherwise compare equal are ordered on the basis of all bytes in the line. These option arguments are also understood: c Check that the input file is sorted according to the ordering rules; give no output unless the file is out of sort. m Merge only, the input files are already sorted. o The next argument is the name of an output file to use instead of the standard output. This file may be the same as one of the inputs. T The next argument is the name of a directory in which temporary files should be made. u Suppress all but one in each set of equal lines. Ignored bytes and bytes outside keys do not participate in this comparison. FILES /usr/tmp/stm* first try for temporary files /tmp/* second trie for temporary files SEE ALSO comm(1), join(1), rev(1), uniq(1) DIAGNOSTICS Comments and exits with nonzero status for various trouble conditions and for disorder discovered under option -c. BUGS Very long lines are silently truncated. EXAMPLES Sort a file called list in numeric order: sort -n list Sort by field 3 in file list where fields are separated by ";": sort -t; +2 -3 list Sort by columns 10 to 24 in numeric order: sort -n +0.9 -0.24 list Take the case where columns 10 to 24 are dates where each two columns is respectively year, month, day, hour, minute, and columns 20 to 24 are sec- onds such as 20.34. Furthermore, assume the seconds can be blank. Then sorting must not be numeric since these are left justified numbers and lex- icographic sorting is required. sort +0.9 -0.24 list Sort by columns 3 and 4 of field 10 where the fields are separated by ":": sort -t: +9.2 -9.4 list Print in alphabetical order all the unique spellings in a list of words. Capitalized words differ from uncapitalized. sort -u +0f +0 list Print the password file (passwd(5)) sorted by user id number (the 3rd colon-separated field). sort -t: +2n /etc/passwd Print the first instance of each month in an already sorted file of (month day) entries. The options -um with just one input file make the choice of a unique representative from a set of equal lines predictable. sort -um +0 -1 dates SORT(1)
NAME | SYNTAX | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | DIAGNOSTICS | BUGS | EXAMPLES
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