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matthew@seymour:~$ sort -r testfile.txt
This command outputs the same contents but this time from Z to a.
You can use sort with files of numbers, but it doesn’t give you a numerical
sort. It gives you output like this:
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matthew@seymour:~$ sort numberfile.txt
1
14
5
58
6
You can see here that the sort command performs a rather useless
alphabetic-style sort on the numbers. Fortunately, there is a switch you can
use to fix this:
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matthew@seymour:~$ sort -n numberfile.txt
1
5
6
14
58
There are tons of neat tricks you can do with sort and many more
parameters explained in the man file. For files with a number of columns,
such as a directory listing, you can specify the -k switch and the number of
the column that you want to sort. Let’s look at an example of a directory of
old conky files and start with a ls command for comparison:
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matthew@seymour:~/conky$ ls -la
total 60
drwxr-xr-x 2 matthew matthew 4096 Dec 25 2012 .
drwxr-xr-x 91 matthew matthew 4096 Jul 28 18:42 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 5526 Dec 25 2012 conkyrc_main
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 5502 Dec 25 2012 conkyrc_main~
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 5387 Apr 16 2008 conkyrc_main (old)
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 1326 Mar 15 2008 conkyrc_weather
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 2549 Oct 23 2009 sample_conky.conf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 128 Apr 8 2008 start_conky (copy).sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 139 Dec 25 2012 start_conky.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 140 Dec 25 2012 start_conky.sh~
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 1503 Sep 30 2007 weather.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 2379 Sep 30 2007 weather.xslt