Sort a file based on 1 column

Question

Possible Duplicate:
how do you sort du output by size?

I have a text file generated from the output of

du --max-depth 1 -h > sizeOfHomeFolder.txt

It's contents are in this format:

$ cat sizeOfHomeFolder.txt  | head
776K    ./Expensemanager
8.0K    ./workspace
4.0M    ./mysql-tutorial
3.6M    ./temp
26M ./Desktop
4.0K    ./Ubuntu One
4.0K    ./Photos
4.0K    ./Public

I need to sort this file based on 1st column i.e. the size.

How to do this with sort or sed or any other common unix utility ?

sort du output by size duplicate? – jw013 Sep 01 '12 at 13:03 — jw013, Sep 01 '12 at 13:03
Thanks cat file | sort -h worked. As simple as that :) – mtk Sep 01 '12 at 13:06 — mtk, Sep 01 '12 at 13:06

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '12 at 13:03

5

If you have a not too old version of GNU sort, you can do

sort -k 1,1h < input.txt

-h is for "human" sort and is required to know that 1.0M is indeed larger than 512K.

answered Sep 01 '12 at 13:03

jw013

51,212

2

+1 for sort -h. it's very useful, esp. for things like sorting du -h. according to the changelog, -h was added to GNU sort on 2009-05-26 – cas Sep 01 '12 at 14:21

Sort a file based on 1 column

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