Sort a File In-Place in Linux

In order to be able to sort the contents of a file in Linux, we must first be aware of the sort command that Linux provides us with.

The sort command is mainly used to sort the contents of a file. It arranges the records in a particular manner. By default, these records are sorted considering the fact that they are ASCII based values.

Few key points to remember about the sort command are −

• SORT command does the sorting from one line to another, one line at a time.

• It prints the contents of the file when used on a file, in the exact same manner like the cat command does.

• It normally ignores case sensitivity.

Syntax

sort filename

Now that we know a little about the sort command, let’s make use of it. Consider the few examples shown below.

Example 1

The file before sorting has the contents in this order.

immukul@192 d1 % cat somefile.txt
Is this text added
this file contains
a new text stream
and i am going to edit
that stream
yes i can do that
ask jeffrey

Command

sort filename.txt

Output

immukul@192 d1 % sort somefile.txt
Is this text added
a new text stream
and i am going to edit
ask jeffrey
that stream
this file contains
yes i can do that

As we can see the output is sorted based on the ASCII encoding.

It should be noted that the output is surely sorted, but the contents of the file won’t be changed at all, and we can confirm this by printing the contents of the file again with the help of the cat command.

immukul@192 d1 % cat somefile.txt
Is this text added
this file contains
a new text stream
and i am going to edit
that stream
yes i can do that
ask jeffrey

In order to actually change the contents of the file you can make use of the command shown below.

sort somefile.txt > anotherfile.txt

Output

immukul@192 d1 % cat anotherfile.txt
Is this text added
a new text stream
and i am going to edit
ask jeffrey
that stream
this file contains
yes i can do that