NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

SORT(1)                         User Commands                        SORT(1)

NAME         top

       sort - sort lines of text files

SYNOPSIS         top

       sort [OPTION]... [FILE]...
       sort [OPTION]... --files0-from=F

DESCRIPTION         top

       Write sorted concatenation of all FILE(s) to standard output.
       With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.
       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options
       too.  Ordering options:
       -b, --ignore-leading-blanks
              ignore leading blanks
       -d, --dictionary-order
              consider only blanks and alphanumeric characters
       -f, --ignore-case
              fold lower case to upper case characters
       -g, --general-numeric-sort
              compare according to general numerical value
       -i, --ignore-nonprinting
              consider only printable characters
       -M, --month-sort
              compare (unknown) < 'JAN' < ... < 'DEC'
       -h, --human-numeric-sort
              compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)
       -n, --numeric-sort
              compare according to string numerical value
       -R, --random-sort
              shuffle, but group identical keys.  See shuf(1)
       --random-source=FILE
              get random bytes from FILE
       -r, --reverse
              reverse the result of comparisons
       --sort=WORD
              sort according to WORD: general-numeric -g, human-numeric -h,
              month -M, numeric -n, random -R, version -V
       -V, --version-sort
              natural sort of (version) numbers within text
       Other options:
       --batch-size=NMERGE
              merge at most NMERGE inputs at once; for more use temp files
       -c, --check, --check=diagnose-first
              check for sorted input; do not sort
       -C, --check=quiet, --check=silent
              like -c, but do not report first bad line
       --compress-program=PROG
              compress temporaries with PROG; decompress them with PROG -d
       --debug
              annotate the part of the line used to sort, and warn about
              questionable usage to stderr
       --files0-from=F
              read input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in
              file F; If F is - then read names from standard input
       -k, --key=KEYDEF
              sort via a key; KEYDEF gives location and type
       -m, --merge
              merge already sorted files; do not sort
       -o, --output=FILE
              write result to FILE instead of standard output
       -s, --stable
              stabilize sort by disabling last-resort comparison
       -S, --buffer-size=SIZE
              use SIZE for main memory buffer
       -t, --field-separator=SEP
              use SEP instead of non-blank to blank transition
       -T, --temporary-directory=DIR
              use DIR for temporaries, not $TMPDIR or /tmp; multiple options
              specify multiple directories
       --parallel=N
              change the number of sorts run concurrently to N
       -u, --unique
              with -c, check for strict ordering; without -c, output only
              the first of an equal run
       -z, --zero-terminated
              line delimiter is NUL, not newline
       --help display this help and exit
       --version
              output version information and exit
       KEYDEF is F[.C][OPTS][,F[.C][OPTS]] for start and stop position,
       where F is a field number and C a character position in the field;
       both are origin 1, and the stop position defaults to the line's end.
       If neither -t nor -b is in effect, characters in a field are counted
       from the beginning of the preceding whitespace.  OPTS is one or more
       single-letter ordering options [bdfgiMhnRrV], which override global
       ordering options for that key.  If no key is given, use the entire
       line as the key.  Use --debug to diagnose incorrect key usage.
       SIZE may be followed by the following multiplicative suffixes: % 1%
       of memory, b 1, K 1024 (default), and so on for M, G, T, P, E, Z, Y.
       *** WARNING *** The locale specified by the environment affects sort
       order.  Set LC_ALL=C to get the traditional sort order that uses
       native byte values.

AUTHOR         top

       Written by Mike Haertel and Paul Eggert.

REPORTING BUGS         top

       GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report sort translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU
       GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
       There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO         top

       shuf(1), uniq(1)
       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/sort>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) sort invocation'

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project can
       be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see 
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained from
       the tarball coreutils-8.27.tar.xz fetched from 
       ⟨http://www.gnutls.org/download.html⟩ on 2017-07-05.  If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
       you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
       to man-pages@man7.org
GNU coreutils 8.27               March 2017                          SORT(1)

Pages that refer to this page: column(1)look(1)ps(1)qsort(3)environ(7)