Sort (Unix)

sort

The sort command
Original author(s)	Ken Thompson (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developer(s)	Various open-source and commercial developers
Initial release	November 3, 1971; 52 years ago (1971-11-03)
Written in	C
Operating system	Multics, Unix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno, MSX-DOS, IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command
License	coreutils: GPLv3+ Plan 9: MIT License

In computing, sort is a standard command line program of Unix and Unix-like operating systems, that prints the lines of its input or concatenation of all files listed in its argument list in sorted order. Sorting is done based on one or more sort keys extracted from each line of input. By default, the entire input is taken as sort key. Blank space is the default field separator. The command supports a number of command-line options that can vary by implementation. For instance the "-r" flag will reverse the sort order.