sort Sort lines of text files. Sort a file in ascending order: sort {{filename}} Sort a file in descending order: sort -r {{filename}} Sort a file using numeric rather than alphabetic order: sort -n {{filename}} Sort the passwd file by the 3rd field, numerically: sort -t: -k 3n /etc/passwd Sort human-readable numbers (in this case the 5th field of ls -lh): ls -lh | sort -h -k 5