Linux Sort Commands for Bioinformatics

Rahul Nayak — Sat, 31 May 2014 15:41:16 -0500

Almost all the scripting languages such as Perl, Python etc have built-in sort, but unfortunately none of them are as flexible as sort command. But one when it come to space efficiency GNU sort stands at the top. It can sort a 20Gb file with less than 2Gb memory. It is not trivial to implement so powerful a sort by yourself.

sort a space-delimited file based on its first column, then the second if the first is the same, and so on:
sort input.txt

sort a huge file (GNU sort ONLY):
sort -S 1500M -t $HOME/tmp input.txt > sorted.txt

sort starting from the third column, skipping the first two columns:
sort +2 input.txt

sort the second column as numbers, descending order; if identical, sort the 3rd as strings, ascending order:
sort -k2,2nr -k3,3 input.txt

sort starting from the 4th character at column 2, as numbers:
sort -k2.4n input.txt

More Linxu sort command information

If you have any sort commands you'd like to share, please add them to our comments section below. For more help, you can also type:

man sort

or

sort --help

on your Unix/Linux system.

BOL: Linux Sort Commands for Bioinformatics

Linux Sort Commands for Bioinformatics