Sort a Tab Delimited File Based on Column Sort Command Bash

Sorting a tab delimited file

Using bash, this will do the trick:

$ sort -t$'\t' -k3 -nr file.txt

Notice the dollar sign in front of the single-quoted string. You can read about
it in the ANSI-C Quoting sections of the bash man page.

Sort a tab delimited file based on column sort command bash

To sort on the fourth column use just the -k 4,4 selector.

sort -t $'\t' -k 4,4 <filename>

You might also want -V which sorts numbers more naturally. For example, yielding 1 2 10 rather than 1 10 2 (lexicographic order).

sort -t $'\t' -k 4,4 -V <filename>

If you're getting errors about the $'\t' then make sure your shell is bash. Perhaps you're missing #!/bin/bash at the top of your script?

How do I sort a tab separated file on the nth column using cygwin sort?

On my machine (Mac bash prompt, GNU sort ...) this works:

sort -t '   ' -k 2,2 in.txt > out.txt

(A "real" tab between the quotes.)

To get the tab there I type CTRL-V, TAB (CTRL-V followed by TAB).

EDIT: I've now tested it on a Windows machine from the cygwin prompt and it works the same there (as I expected, bash is bash).

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 rows in a tab delimited file with numerical order

Specify the character index where numbers begin in the field in KEYDEF. In this case we want to sort on the numeric part of the first field, which begins from the 3rd char, thus -k1.3n:

$ sort -k1.3n file
ch1     1       209
ch1     23      890
ch3     45      21
ch4     66      12
ch10    11      53
ch10    12      90