Questions tagged [sort]
Sorting text files or other data, for example with the sort utility.
994
questions
326
votes
5
answers
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views
Sort and count number of occurrence of lines
I have Apache logfile, access.log, how to count number of line occurrence in that file? for example the result of cut -f 7 -d ' ' | cut -d '?' -f 1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' is
a.php
b.php
a.php
c....
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votes
18
answers
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views
How do you sort du output by size?
How do you sort du -sh /dir/* by size? I read one site that said use | sort -n but that's obviously not right. Here's an example that is wrong.
[~]# du -sh /var/* | sort -n
0 /var/mail
1.2M /...
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214
votes
6
answers
537k
views
Sort based on the third column
I'm facing a huge 4-columns file. I'd like to display the sorted file in stdout based on its 3rd column:
cat myFile | sort -u -k3
Is that enough to perform the trick?
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207
votes
11
answers
173k
views
List files sorted numerically
I have a bunch of files from log1 to log164.
I'm trying to LIST the directory (sorted) in a UNIX terminal but the sort functions are only providing the format like this:
home:logs Home$ ls -1 | sort
...
Rabiani
169
votes
5
answers
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views
What is the difference between "sort -u" and "sort | uniq"?
Everywhere I see someone needing to get a sorted, unique list, they always pipe to sort | uniq. I've never seen any examples where someone uses sort -u instead. Why not? What's the difference, and why ...
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158
votes
3
answers
221k
views
Trying to sort on two fields, second then first
I am trying to sort on multiple columns. The results are not as expected.
Here's my data (people.txt):
Simon Strange 62
Pete Brown 37
Mark Brown 46
Stefan Heinz 52
Tony Bedford 50
John Strange 51
...
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134
votes
6
answers
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views
Sorting the output of "find -print0" by piping to the "sort" command
I need to be able to alphabetically sort the output of find before piping it to a command. Entering | sort | between didn't work, so what could I do?
find folder1 folder2 -name "*.txt" -print0 | ...
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votes
4
answers
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Does sort support sorting a file in-place, like `sed --in-place`?
Am I blind or is there no option like --in-place for sort?
In order to save results to the input file, sed uses -i (--in-place).
Redirecting the output of sort to the input file
sort < f > f
...
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104
votes
13
answers
48k
views
How can I remove duplicates in my .bash_history, preserving order?
I really enjoying using control+r to recursively search my command history. I've found a few good options I like to use with it:
# ignore duplicate commands, ignore commands starting with a space
...
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100
votes
16
answers
80k
views
sort but keep header line at the top
I am getting output from a program that first produces one line that is a bunch of column headers, and then a bunch of lines of data. I want to cut various columns of this output and view it sorted ...
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49
votes
3
answers
77k
views
How to sort big files?
I have a PC with Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G640 @ 2.80 GHz and 8 GB of RAM. I am running Scientific Linux 6.5 on it with EXT3 filesystem.
On this setup, what is the fastest way I can do a sort -u on a ...
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46
votes
3
answers
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views
How can I sort a mix of numeric and alphabetic characters?
How can I sort input such as this using the sort command? I would like the numbers to be sorted numerically before the letters.
10
11
12
1
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
2
22
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
X
Y
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42
votes
6
answers
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views
Sort all directories based on their size
I'd like to sort all the directories/files in a specific directory based on their size (using du -sh "name").
I need to apply this command to all directories in my location, then sort them based on ...
- 4,038
39
votes
6
answers
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views
Get text-file word occurrence count of all words & print output sorted
I had a command which would work through a text file, count all the occurrences of the words and print it out like this:
user@box $˜ magic-command-i-forgot | with grep | and awk | sort ./textfile.txt
...
user2909
34
votes
2
answers
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views
How to numerical sort by last column?
I have this input:
sdkxyosl 1
safkls 2
asdf--asdfasxy_asd 5
dkd8k jasd 29
sdi44sw 43
asasd afsdfs 10
rklyasd 4
I need this output:
sdi44sw 43
dkd8k jasd 29
asasd afsdfs 10
asdf--asdfasxy_asd 5
...
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34
votes
1
answer
5k
views
Why is sort changing the order of lines with identical sort keys?
Here is the data:
D 2
B 2
A 2
When I run this command:
sort -k2,2 file
it outputs:
A 2
B 2
D 2
My question is that when I specify only the second column -k2,2,
why is it that it sorts by the ...
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32
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Why is sort -o useful?
UNIX philosophy says: do one thing and do it well. Make programs that handle text, because that is a universal interface.
The sort command, at least GNU sort, has an -o option to output to a file ...
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32
votes
4
answers
12k
views
Why does ls sorting ignore non-alphanumeric characters?
When sorting file names, ls ignores characters like -,_. I expected it to use those characters in sorting as well.
An example:
touch a1 a2 a-1 a-2 a_1 a_2 a.1 a.2 a,1 a,2
Now display these files ...
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31
votes
5
answers
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views
How is it possible to sort ps command's CPU field?
I'm trying to make a small command that will find the processes that use the most CPU power.
Firstly, I use ps aux > file.txt and then cut -c 16-20 file.txt | sort -n | tail -5.
The result I get ...
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31
votes
5
answers
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How to list files sorted by modification date recursively (no stat command available!)
How can I get the list of all files under current directory along with their modification date and sorted by that date?
Now I know how to achieve that with find, stat and sort, but for some weird ...
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30
votes
4
answers
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views
How do I make ls sort underscore characters first?
I like being able to name files and directories with an underscore prefix if it's something I want to keep separate from other files and directories at the same level. On Windows and Mac, for example, ...
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29
votes
3
answers
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Scalability of 'sort -u' for gigantic files
What is reasonable scalability limit of sort -u?
(in dimensions of "line length", "amount of lines", "total file size")
What is Unix alternative for files exceeding this ...
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29
votes
1
answer
51k
views
Sort only on the second column [duplicate]
I'm trying to sort a file where typically (not always) the lines are
whatever:[A-Ba-b0-9_]: values
where fields are separated with :. Some lines do not follow this pattern, I'm not interested in ...
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29
votes
3
answers
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views
What's the default order of Linux sort?
For a long period I thought the default behavior of the sort program was using ASCII order. However, when I input the following lines into sort without any arguments:
#
@
I got:
@
#
But according ...
old_bear
29
votes
5
answers
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views
Specify the sort order with LC_COLLATE so lowercase is before uppercase
Given the file:
$ cat file
1
a
C
B
2
c
3
A
b
By default sort will:
$ sort file
1
2
3
a
A
b
B
c
C
With LC_COLLATE=C so will sort in uppercase letter before lowercase:
$ LC_COLLATE=C sort file
1
2
...
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28
votes
4
answers
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views
sort command in unix with numeric sort
I have file1:
"$lvl=57"
"$lvl=20"
"$lvl=48"
"$lvl=17"
"$lvl=58"
File2 I want:
"$lvl=17"
"$lvl=20"
"$lvl=48"
"$lvl=57"
"$lvl=58"
Basically numerically sort of file1.
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27
votes
3
answers
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views
Why does sort say that ɛ = e?
ɛ ("Latin epsilon") is a letter used in certain African languages, usually to represent the vowel sound in English "bed". In Unicode it's encoded as U+025B, very distinct from everyday e.
However, if ...
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27
votes
3
answers
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views
How to sort the string which combined with string + numeric using bash script?
This is the data what I want to sort. But sort treats the numeric to string, the data it no sorted as I expected.
/home/files/profile1
/home/files/profile10
/home/files/profile11
/home/files/...
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27
votes
7
answers
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views
Sorting ls output by date in filename, in reverse order
I can generate output sorted by date in "normal order" with the following command:
ls -A -lR | grep "^-" | sed "s/.\{43\}/&\n/" | grep -v "^-" | while read ...
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27
votes
1
answer
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views
Sort data in descending order of first column, for equal values, use second column in ascending order
Allow me to clarify:
Assume I have some keywords with frequency of their usage:
12 Hi
7 Hash
7 C++
9 Superuser
17 Stackoverflow
9 LaTeX
42 Life
9 Ubuntu
What I want, is to sort this data ...
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votes
6
answers
8k
views
How can I sort a list with major.minor.patch level and sometimes rc correctly?
I have to sort the following list with a shell script and make the latest version appear on the bottom or top. How would I do that with shell tools only?
release-5.0.0.rc1
release-5.0.0.rc2
release-5....
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answer
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How to use "parallel" to speed up "sort" for big files fitting in RAM?
I have a 100 M line file that fits in RAM on a GNU/Linux system.
This is rather slow:
sort bigfile > bigfile.sorted
and does not use all 48 cores on my machine.
How do I sort that file fast?
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23
votes
3
answers
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views
Why is coreutils sort slower than Python?
I wrote the following script to test the speed of Python's sort functionality:
from sys import stdin, stdout
lines = list(stdin)
lines.sort()
stdout.writelines(lines)
I then compared this to the ...
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votes
2
answers
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Sort with field separator [duplicate]
I'm trying to sort the /etc/passwd numerically by user id numbersb(third field) in ascending order and then send it to s4.
What command would I uses to do that? I'm on this for a while now.
21
votes
2
answers
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views
How to sort results from ls command by modification date (directories first)?
I can fire
ls -lrt
to get files and folders sorted by modification date, but this does not separate directories from files. I want ls to show me first directories by modification date and then ...
- 2,069
21
votes
5
answers
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views
Sort the output of find -exec ls
Is it possible to the output of find … -exec ls -ls ; sorted alpabetically, by filename?
This is my cron command:
find /home/setefgge/public_html -type f -ctime -1 -exec ls -ls {} \;
This command ...
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votes
7
answers
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views
join : "File 2 not in sorted order"
I've got two files _jeter3.txt and _jeter1.txt
I've checked they are both sorted on the 20th column using sort -c
sort -t ' ' -c -k20,20 _jeter3.txt
sort -t ' ' -c -k20,20 _jeter1.txt
#no ...
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19
votes
7
answers
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views
Sort the files in the directory recursively based on last modified date
Sort the files in the directory recursively based on last modified date
I have modified a lot of files in my directory want to know what are those files by sorting them by the last modified date ...
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19
votes
1
answer
69k
views
How to sort by multiple columns? [duplicate]
I have a tab-separated file, and I want to sort it by its columns 9, 14, and 16. By this I mean that all rows that agree at column 9 should be sorted by column 14, and among these, those that also ...
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19
votes
3
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views
How to find the largest open files?
Looking for the largests among the open files by all processes.
lsof already has the open files with their sizes. It may be passing the right parameters to lsof and processing the output.
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18
votes
3
answers
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Sort not sorting lines with a pipe '|' in it correctly
I am trying to sort some simple pipe-delimited data. However, sort isn't actually sorting. It moves my header row to the bottom, but my two rows starting with 241 are being split by a row starting ...
- 183
18
votes
1
answer
685
views
Directory listing not fully sorted
I have the following directory listing on a Debian Linux system. However, one strange thing is that the file populate.sql does not seem to be sorted with the rest.
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 10004 Jul ...
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5
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views
How to sort human readable size
I'm basically looking for files then sorting by the size. The script works if I don't sort the size by human readable. But I want the size to be human readable. How can I sort sizes that are human ...
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votes
2
answers
2k
views
GNU sort stable sort when sort does not know sort order
I have a two-column file; the file is sorted the way I want it on column 1 already. I would like to sort on column 2, within each column 1 category. However, sort does not understand the sort order of ...
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17
votes
2
answers
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views
Grep starting from a fixed text, until the first blank line
I have a file prova.txt like this:
Start to grab from here: 1
fix1
fix2
fix3
fix4
random1
random2
random3
random4
extra1
extra2
bla
Start to grab from here: 2
fix1
fix2
fix3
fix4
random1546
...
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17
votes
4
answers
11k
views
sort by hex value
Using coreutils sort, how can I sort numerically by a hexadecimal value (field)? I was expecting something along the lines of
sort -k3,3x file_to_sort
however, such an x does not exist.
Edit: Best ...
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2
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views
How to sort this output 1,10,11..2
Sometimes I need to add more disk to a database; for that, I need to list the disks to see what disks already exist.
The problem is that the output is always sorted as 1,10,11,12...2,20,21...3 etc.
...
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16
votes
2
answers
20k
views
sort output by column
I'd like to take this command find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r dir; do printf "%s:\t" "$dir"; find "$dir" | wc -l; done ( from here ). which has an output of basically
./kennel: 11062
./...
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6
answers
10k
views
Can I parallelize sort?
For example for bzip there is pbzip, a parallel version of bzip. Is there any such parallelization tools for sort to improve performance?
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votes
8
answers
4k
views
How can I find the most frequent word in a .csv file, ignoring duplicates on each line?
I need to find the 10 most frequent words in a .csv file.
The file is structured so that each line contains comma-separated words. If the same word is repeated more than once in the same line, it ...
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