How to Sort a File, Based on Its Numerical Values for a Field

How to sort a file, based on its numerical values for a field?

Take a peek at the man page for sort...

   -n, --numeric-sort
          compare according to string numerical value

So here is an example...

sort -n filename

How to sort text file based on number after first letter

You should sort as numerically,

sort --numeric-sort --field-separator "-" --key 2 some.txt

or a shorter version

sort -n -t "-" -k 2 some.txt

Sort a text file by numeric value of the last word on each line

If you reverse the file, you can then sort from the numbers and reverse back

$ sed 's/[^0-9]*\(.*\)/\1 &/' input_file | sort -rn | sed 's/[^a-z]*\(.*\)/\1/'
blabla 45
blabla 23
blabla 12
blabla 5
blabla 4

Sort numerically by all fields in bash

This is actually quite a subtle problem, to do with the way sort handles numeric fields. The upshot is that you need to explicitly tell sort to sort numerically on each key field:

sort -t, -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n

If you don't do that, the info section for GNU sort says, slightly paraphrased,

sort would have used all characters beginning in the [first] field and
extending to the end of the line as the primary numeric key. For
the large majority of applications, treating keys spanning more
than one field as numeric will not do what you expect.

which neatly summarises what you saw!

Obviously specifying keys explicitly is going to make sort inconvenient to use on files with arbitrarily long lists of numbers on each line. As a hack, you could try GNU sort with its version sort option, -V.

sort -V

which appears to do the right thing on your particular data. I've tested sort -V on lines with 600 numbers, and it works fine.

sort numerically based on the first column

sort reads from stdin and command-line as well. Thus if you have a file you can:

sort < file
# or
sort file

if you want sort based on first column you can:

sort -k1 < file

But if fact it does affect the output since by default it does not care about numerical order. Thus you should add -n option:

  -n, --numeric-sort          compare according to string numerical value

and doing it like:

sort -k1 -n < file

it outputs:

061     data1
238 data6
264 data7
439 data9
682 help
1264    moredata
2305    data2
4080    data3
5640    otherdata
9251    data4
11844   data5
33940   data8

and if you provide it with -r it print in reverse order:

33940   data8
11844   data5
9251    data4
5640    otherdata
4080    data3
2305    data2
1264    moredata
682 help
439 data9
264 data7
238 data6
061     data1

How to do a bash sort by numerical value contained between two different delimiters in the set of strings

We can use bash sort;

ls | sort -g -t '_' -k 2

• -g: Sort on general-numeric
• -t: field-separator (_)
• -k: Key, 2 means: Get second col (after -t)

Example:

-> ls -t
DataFile_42.txt  DataFile_162.txt  DataFile_15.txt  DataFile_1.txt
->
-> ls | sort -g -t '_' -k 2
DataFile_1.txt
DataFile_15.txt
DataFile_42.txt
DataFile_162.txt

---

If you add the --debug option, we can visually see how -t and -k works:

-> ls | sort -g -t '_' -k 2 --debug
sort: text ordering performed using simple byte comparison
sort: key 1 is numeric and spans multiple fields
DataFile_1.txt
         __
______________
DataFile_15.txt
         ___
_______________
DataFile_42.txt
         ___
_______________
DataFile_162.txt
         ____
________________
-> 

How to sort a file based on key name instead of its position in unix?

sort doesn't have a concept of named keys, but you can perform a Schwartzian transform to temporarily add the key as a prefix to the line, sort on the first field, then discard it.

sed 's/\(.*\)\(party_id="[^"]*"\)/\2    \1\2/' file |
sort -t '   ' -k1,1 |
cut -f2-

(where the whitespace between the two first back references and in the sort -t argument is a literal tab, which however Stack Overflow renders as a sequence of spaces).

Sorting data based on second column of a file

You can use the key option of the sort command, which takes a "field number", so if you wanted the second column:

sort -k2 -n yourfile

-n, --numeric-sort compare according to string numerical value

For example:

$ cat ages.txt 
Bob 12
Jane 48
Mark 3
Tashi 54

$ sort -k2 -n ages.txt 
Mark 3
Bob 12
Jane 48
Tashi 54

sort alphanumerically with priority for numbers in linux

So, basically, you're asking to sort the first field numerically in descending order, but if the numeric keys are the same, you want the second field to be ordered in natural, or ascending, order.

I tried a few things, but here's the way I managed to make it work:

   sort -nk2 file.txt  | sort -snrk1

Explanation:

• The first command sorts the whole file using the second, alphanumeric field in natural order, while the second command sorts the output using the first numeric field, shows it in reverse order, and requests that it be a "stable" sort.

• -n is for numeric sort, versus alphanumeric, in which 6 would come before 60.

• -r is for reversed order, so from highest to lowest. If unspecified, it will assume natural, or ascending, order.
• -k which key, or field, to use for sorting order.
• -s for stable ordering. This option maintains the original record order of records that have an equal key.

Bash:: How to sort according to first numeric column of file?

How about this:

sed -e 's/^[^0-9.]*\([0-9.]\+\).*$/\1\t\0/' input | sort -n | cut -f 2-

We extract the first numeric field and we insert it to the beginning of each line. Then we sort numerically all lines and then we remove the stuff that we added in the first step.

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