How to sort 3 digit versions with unix sort

Question

I have a file of software versions of the form a.b.c where a, b, and c are integers. For example

2.10.1
1.10.3
10.4.9
1.9.10 
1.2.30

I have tried:

sort -k 1n -k1,3 -t $'.' versions

And this works but only on the first column. How do I specify sub-sorting on column 2 and 3?

Matthias · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-19 22:05:21Z

2

This sorts your mentioned version numbers right. The separator is set to ., the comparison is numerically by -n and the order is first from column 1 to 1-k 1,1, second from column 2 to 2 -k 2,2 and third from column 3 to 3 -k 3,3.

$ echo '2.10.1
1.10.3
10.4.9
1.9.10
1.2.30' | sort -t '.' -n -k 1,1 -k 2,2 -k 3,3

1.2.30
1.9.10
1.10.3
2.10.1
10.4.9

edited Mar 19, 2015 at 22:05

answered Mar 19, 2015 at 21:58

Matthias

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1 Comment

David Williams Over a year ago

Awesome, thanks, I had come up with some unwieldy cmd line perl. Nice and clean Matthias, cheers.

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