How to sort a file in-place

Question

When we use sort file command   the file shows its contents in a sorted way what if I don t want to get any-kind of output but a sorted file

User · Answer

The sort command prints the result of the sorting operation to standard output by default  In order to achieve an  in-place  sort  you can do this   sort -o file file   This overwrites the input file with the sorted output  The -o switch  used to specify an output  is defined by POSIX  so should be available on all version of sort      -o Specify the name of an output file to be used instead of the standard output  This file can be the same as one of the input files    If you are unfortunate enough to have a version of sort without the -o switch  Luis assures me that they exist   you can achieve an  in-place  edit in the standard way   sort file  gt  tmp  amp  amp  mv tmp file

User · Answer

Here s an approach which  ab uses vim   vim -c  sort -c  wq -E -s    filename     The -c  sort -c  wq portion invokes commands to vim after the file opens    -E and -s are necessary so that vim executes in a  headless  mode which doesn t draw to the terminal   This has almost no benefits over the sort -o    filename      filename   approach except that it only takes the filename argument once     This was useful for me to implement a formatter directive in a nanorc entry for  gitignore files   Here s what I used for that   syntax  gitignore     gitignore    formatter vim -c  sort -c  wq -E -s

User · Answer

You can use file redirection to redirected the sorted output  sort input-file  gt  output file  Or you can use the -o  --output FILE option of sort to indicate the same input and output file  sort -o file file  Without repeating the filename  with bash brace expansion  sort -o file        Note  A common mistake is to try to redirect the output to the same input file  e g  sort file  gt  file    This does not work as the shell is making the redirections  not the sort 1  program  and the input file  as being the output also  will be erased just before giving the sort 1  program the opportunity of reading it

User · Answer

Do you want to sort all files in a folder and subfolder overriding them   Use this   find   -type f -exec sort    -o

User · Answer

No answers about few files  so  sort -u file1 file2 -o file1

User · Answer

To sort file in place  try   echo    sort your file    gt  your file   As explained in other answers  you cannot directly redirect the output back to the input file  But you can evaluate the sort command first and then redirect it back to the original file  In this way you can implement in-place sort   Similarly  you can also apply this trick to other command like paste to implement row-wise appending

User · Answer

sort file   sponge file   This is in the following Fedora package   moreutils   Additional unix utilities Repo          fedora Matched from  Filename       usr bin sponge

[linux] How to sort a file in-place

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