sort sorts its inputs

$ sort name.txt

the default sort is alphabetical

sort -n: numeric sort

sort order (sad face):

• 12
• 15000
• 48
• 6020
• 96

sort -n order (happy face):

• 12
• 48
• 96
• 6020
• 15000

sort -h: human sort

sort -n order (sad face):

• 15 G
• 30 M
• 45 K
• 200 G

sort -h order (happy face):

• 45 K
• 30 M
• 15 G
• 200 G

useful example: du -sh * | sort -h

uniq removes duplicates

before:

• a
• b
• b
• a
• c
• c

after:

• a
• b
• a
• c

(notice there are still 2 ‘a’s! uniq only uniquifies adjacent matching lines

sort + uniq = (heart)

Pipe something to sort | uniq and you’ll get a deduplicated list of lines! sort -u does the same thing.

before sort -u (or sort | uniq):

• b
• a
• b
• a

after:

• a
• b

uniq -c

counts each line it saw.

Recipe: get the top 10 most common lines in a file:

$ sort foo.txt
   | uniq -c
   | sort -n
   | tail -n 10

happy little stick figure with curly hair: I use this a lot!