sort Command on Linux: Sort Lines, Numbers and Log Columns

sort on Linux powers log analysis one-liners — IP counts, disk usage lists, and package versions all start with sort before uniq -c. Getting numeric sort (-n) and field keys (-k) right avoids misleading “9 before 10” results.

Related: uniq,
wc,
cut.

Basic alphabetical

Default locale rules affect order — use LC_ALL=C for predictable ASCII sort in scripts.

sort names.txt

Numeric sort

-n compares as numbers, not strings — required for version-like columns.

printf '%s\n' 9 10 2 | sort -n

Sort by field

-k picks the key after delimiter — pair with -t tab or comma.

sort -t, -k3 -n data.csv

Human-readable sizes

-h understands K, M, G suffixes from du output.

Quick Reference

• Text: sort file
• Numbers: sort -n
• Field: sort -k2 -n

Related tutorials

• cut
• grep
• Apache log script

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