Sorting the Contents of a File with sort
You have a text file. You want to sort its contents alphabetically. That is easy. Let’s assume our test file is filled with one letter on each line, upper- or lowercase.
matthew@seymour:~$ sort testfile.txtaAbB
That is useful. You can also sort in reverse order:
matthew@seymour:~$ sort -r testfile.txt
This will output the same contents, but this time from Z to a.
You can use sort with files of numbers, but you don’t want a normal sort. That will give you output like this:
matthew@seymour:~$ sort numberfile.txt1145586
The command performs a rather useless alphabetic style sorting. Fortunately, there is a switch we ...
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