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Hello the beautiful people.

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And welcome to this video where we're going to be learning about the super useful sword command.

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Now, the sword command is one of those commands that you can kind of use anywhere to sort data and

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make it more ordered and easier to manage.

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And over the next few videos, I'm going to be showing you how you can use the sort command to sort

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data in a variety of different ways.

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And I'll also be showing you some use cases of when this can be really useful, and we'll be building

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a super powerful pipeline that will allow us to sort data in tabular format.

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So by the end, you're going to be amazing at sorting data and you'll have a really good understanding

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of how to use the sort command to sort data in Linux no matter what, no matter whether it's text numbers,

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modified numbers, or even in tables.

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Ooh.

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So this is going to be a very useful section of the course.

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Let's go ahead and jump right into it.

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Okay.

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So the first thing I should probably say is that I've put three files on my desktop.

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I've got words text which contains 100 random words sorted in no particular order.

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They're just 100 random words that are just in that file.

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And we've got the numbers 0 to 9 point text, which is a file that has loads of numbers in there.

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I think 100 numbers each between zero and nine.

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And we've also got this other file here called Numbers Text, which is, I think another hundred random

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numbers.

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But they don't they're in no particular range.

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They're just 100 random numbers with no specific limit on them.

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And I've made these files available in the resources section as well as some information about how I

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created them.

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So if you want to grab those and try this stuff out for yourself, then you can go ahead and download

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them and give it a go.

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Okay.

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So let's start off by taking a look at this words txt, which is a file that contains 100 randomly generated

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words.

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And as I said, like if we just open that up again, it's just got 100 random words in there in no particular

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order, no particular length, just 100 randomly generated words.

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Okay.

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So first of all, how can we sort that file so that it's sorted alphabetically?

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So everything that starts with an A is at the top and everything that starts with a Z is at the bottom.

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Well, that's actually the default behaviour of the sort command, which is the perfectly named command

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for this kind of thing.

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So it's really simple to use as well.

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If we just type sort words, dot text that we've now got a list of sorted of sorted words from A to

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Z.

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So you can see that all the words that start with A at the top and all the words that start with Y are

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at the bottom.

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And it doesn't look like we've got anything that starts with a Z.

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So they've all been sorted alphabetically.

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So that's pretty cool.

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And of course we can write this standard output to a file or to a T command.

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We can use that as well.

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So like we could say, say into the file here called sorted text and that's going to be output there

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and we can pipe it down the pipeline.

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You know, it's just written on standard output.

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All the same rules apply.

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So what if we wanted instead of sorting it A to Z, what if we wanted to sort it in reverse?

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How would we sort it?

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So Z was at the top.

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Well, two options come to mind.

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First of all, what you could do is you could just sort the words like just like normal, but then pipe

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that into the tac command.

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And as you can see here, what's happened is the letters, the words that start with a or now at the

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bottom and the words that start with closer to Z are now at the top.

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And the reason for that is that, as we know, the tac command will sort or flip output vertically.

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So what would be at the bottom is now at the top and what was at the top is now at the bottom.

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So that's effectively as though we've just reversed the sorting.

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Right.

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But a better way to do it, I suppose a more built in and efficient way to do it would be to just give

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the sort command the R option and the R option stands for reverse.

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So if I do that, we can see again we've got the letters starting with a R towards the bottom.

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The word starting with a R towards the bottom.

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Sorry.

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And the words starting with close to Z are now at the top.

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And now you may notice that when I'm showing you this output that I'm scrolling up and down the shell

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quite a bit.

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So this is where the less command would come in.

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I could just pipe it into the less command to make the output a bit easier to view because now I'm using

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the arrow keys instead of scrolling with my mouse pad.

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So that's, you know, a bit of a nicer way to deal with things and compress.

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Q to come out of that.

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So just building upon what we did before, so awesome.

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Notice how you have you now have enough building blocks that you can solve the same problem in multiple

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ways.

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You know that you could now use the R option to reverse it.

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Or if you didn't want to do that, you could also pipe it into the tack command.

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This is one great thing about Linux.

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It gives you multiple different ways to solve the same problem because you've got so many different

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building blocks, so there's plenty of room for creativity in the way that you approach these problems

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is not necessarily one right way to do it.

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So so there we are now.

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How about sorting numbers?

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Well, I, I have a list here of 100 numbers called numbers text.

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And if we take a look, there's 100 numbers in there that don't have any particular size limit.

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They can be any number, but there's 100 of them.

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Okay.

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So how would we sort those?

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Well, sorting with letters.

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So sorting eight A-Z sorting alphabetically is different from sorting numbers, which is sorting numerically.

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So if we try to do sort numbers just like that, you see it didn't really work that well.

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What kind of happened here is if you if you notice and we put this into the less command so we can make

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it a bit easier to see, you know, so all the numbers that started with one have come to the top.

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And then it kind of as you see now, we're getting all the numbers that start with two.

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And then we'll get in all numbers that start with three and so on.

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But we're not a four or five, six, seven, eight and nine.

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You can see it's sorting by the first digit, but it's not sorting by the value of that number.

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For example, 160 16,029 is much bigger than 1641.

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So why is it above it?

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Right.

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There's no real sense of the size of the number.

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It's just the fact that it starts with a number one and it's sorting numerically as it goes.

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It's sorting as it goes along by just looking at the number.

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It's not looking at the value of the number, it's just looking at the digits.

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But if you want to sort using the value of the number, you need to give the sort command the N option.

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So the RN option allows it to sort numerically.

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When we take a look at that now, you can see that we're getting the smallest numbers at the top.

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So we're starting with 123 and then the numbers are getting bigger as they go down.

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So that's something important to bear in mind.

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Sorting just by the digits is different than sorting by the value of the whole number.

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And if you want to search by the value of the whole number, you need to give it the N option.

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And of course, you can reverse this so that the biggest at the top by using the giving the R option

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as well for reverse.

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So now we see that the biggest numbers are at the top and as we scroll down, the numbers get smaller.

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So that's very, very nice.

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So you've seen how to sort text alphabetically and you've seen her two sort numbers numerically.

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But one thing that's very useful is to only show unique results rather than the same result over and

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over and over again.

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So we've got a file here called numbers 0 to 9 point text.

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And in there there's 100 rows of data, but only the rows only contain one of the numbers from 0 to

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9.

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So you'll necessarily have some duplicates.

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For example, here we've got 000.

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It's not just unique results.

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There are results that are repeated.

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So if we take a look in here and we try to sort that, which are just sort numbers 0 to 9.2, so let's

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pipe it into less.

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You'll see that all the zeros come first, then all the ones and all the twos and all the threes and

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all the fours, the fives, the six, the 7/8 and the nines.

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And that's that's a bit it's a bit annoying.

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Okay, maybe we just want to just have the results once.

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Well, to do that, what you do is you give the sort option sort command the you option and the you

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option stands for unique.

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And when you run that now you'll see that we only get the results once.

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So let me just set up hoping that into less.

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There you go.

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You can see the you only get the results once so 0 to 9 and this is useful.

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Sometimes you don't want to have the same result repeated over and over and over again.

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You only want the results to appear once.

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And that's why you would use the you option which allows you to sort uniquely.

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And of course this still works with other options such as the reverse, which now we're sorting backwards

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and you can still sort numerically and whatever else you might need to do.

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But that's just how you can make sure that you only get each of the results once.

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So in this video you've had a bit of an introduction to the Salt Command, and you've seen that you

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can sort data using the sort command.

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Now, the sort command tends to sort.

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Smallest first.

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So it'll tend to sort from A to Z or from 0 to 9 by default.

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But you can reverse this by using the R option.

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So the R option stands for reverse.

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And if you ever sorting numerical data and you want the sort command to take into account the actual

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value of the number rather than just the digits that it contains, then make sure that you give the

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sort command the N option to allow it to sort numerically.

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And if you only want to get unique results out of the sort command, provide it with the U option which

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will filter out just the results that appear once.

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So that's what we covered in this video.

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But in the next video, we're going to take it to a next level and show you some advanced sorting techniques

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that will allow you to sort data that comes in table format.

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So and we're also going to be building a really cool pipeline that will do some of this as well.

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So let's just go ahead and get right into it in the next video and take your sorting skills to the next

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level.