Sorting a tab delimited file using the Unix sort command is easy once you know which parameters to use. An advanced file sort can get difficult to define if it has multiple columns, uses tab characters as column separators, uses reverse sort order on some columns, and where you want the columns sorted in non-sequential order.

Assume that we have the following file where each column is separated by a [TAB] character:

Group-ID   Category-ID   Text        Frequency
----------------------------------------------
200        1000          oranges     10
200        900           bananas     5
200        1000          pears       8
200        1000          lemons      10
200        900           figs        4
190        700           grapes      17

I’d like to have this file sorted by these columns and in this specific order. I want column 4 sorted before column 3, and column 4 to be sorted in reverse order:

• Group ID (integer)
• Category ID (integer)
• Frequency “sorted in reverse order” (integer)
• Text (alpha-numeric)

I want the file sorted this way:

Group-ID   Category-ID   Text        Frequency
----------------------------------------------
190        700           grapes      17
200        900           bananas     5
200        900           figs        4
200        1000          lemons      10
200        1000          oranges     10
200        1000          pears       8

To sort the file that way we have to define the sort parameters like this:

sort -t $'\t' -k 1n,1 -k 2n,2 -k4rn,4 -k3,3 <my-file>

The first thing we need to do is to tell sort to use TAB as a column separator (column separated or delimited) which we can do using:

sort -t $'\t' <my-file>

If our input file was comma separated we could have used:

sort -t "," <my-file>

The next step is define that we want the file sorted by columns 1, 2, 4 and 3 and in this particular order. The key argument “-k” allows us to do this. The tricky part is that you have to define the column index twice to limit the sort to any given column, e.g. like this “-k 1,1”. If you only specify it once like this “-k 1” you’re telling Unix “sort” to sort the file from column 1 and until the end of the line which is not what we want. If you want to sort column 1 and 2 together you’d use “-k 1,2”.  To tell sort to sort multiple columns we have to define the key argument “-k” multiple times. The sort arguments required to sort our file in column order 1, 2, 4 and 3 will therefore look like this:

sort -t $'\t' -k 1,1 -k 2,2 -k 4,4 -k 3,3 <my-file>

We however want the 4th column sorted in reverse order. We instruct sort to do by changing the argument from “-k 4,4” to “-k 4r,4”. The “r” option reverses the sort order for that column only. There’s only one problem left to solve and that is that sort by default will interpret numbers as text and will sort e.g.  the number 10 ahead of 2. We solve this by adding the “n” option to tell “sort” to sort a column using its numerical values e.g. “-k 1n,1”. Note that the “n” option is only attached to the first number to the left of the comma. Since the 4th column is sorted in both reversed order and using numerical values we can combine the options like this “-k 4rn,4”

So by adding all of these options together with end up with:

sort -t $'\t' -k 1n,1 -k 2n,2 -k 4rn,4 -k 3,3 <my-file>

I hope someone will find this useful. I tested this solution on both Linux and OS X. The documentation for the Unix sort command can be found using your man command “man sort” and “info sort”.