Sort

Random sorting

While GNU/sort has the -R option to sort randomly, the GNU/sort version on MacOS X is much older and lacks this option. We can use Perl as a substitute though:

$ cat foo
1
2
3

$ perl -MList::Util=shuffle -e 'print shuffle(<STDIN>);' < foo
3
1
2

With GNU/sort 8.13:

$ sort -R foo
1
3
2

Remove duplicates without sorting

Consider this file:

$ cat foo
AAA
CCC
AAA
BBB

With sort (or sort & uniq), we can remove the duplicates, but the original order is destroyed:

$ sort -u foo
AAA
BBB
CCC

AWK to the rescue!

$ awk '!x[$0]++' foo
AAA
CCC
BBB

Sorting by line length

$ cat foo
some line
a longer line
an even longer line
line
a short line

Sort by line length with awk:

$ awk '{print length, $0 }' foo | sort -n -s | cut -d" " -f2-
line
some line
a short line
a longer line
an even longer line

Sorting in Vim

To sort only a range within the file, from the cursor to the next matching ], at the end of a line:

criticalpatterns => [
         ░'kernel:',
          'ipsec:',
          'portmap:',
],



:.,/\],$/ sort u

The u removes duplicate lines too.