When I was a kid, we spent many hours, in grades three through six, rewriting lists of words in alphabetical order. The advantage was twofold: writing practice (which, back then, was practically half of elementary school) and understanding how words are ordered in a dictionary. Those exercises could be ponderous; here I am, anyway:)<\/p>\n
Today, you needn’t alphabetize a list yourself. Just type it, one word per line, to a file, then let the Windows terminal sort<\/span> function take care of it. The basic syntax, at the command prompt, is To test the sort<\/span> command, I first created a file called tosort0.txt<\/span>. Its contents: At the command prompt, I then ran Next, I opened the file sorted0.txt<\/span>, which hadn’t existed before. Indeed, its contents are However, the file tosort0.txt<\/span> remains unchanged.<\/p>\n Next I ran, from the command line, The list, in alphabetical order, printed to the screen.<\/p>\n Once again: if you don’t specify the output file, you’ll see the sorted list print right to the command line. If you specify an output file that doesn’t exist, the command will create it, then print the sorted list to it. The input file whose contents get sorted remains unchanged.<\/p>\n Neat, huh?<\/p>\n
\n
\nsort input_file<\/i> \/o output_file<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nlewis
\nlouise
\ntender
\nant
\nimportation
\n22
\n101
\n01
\na
\n!
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nsort tosort0.txt \/o sorted0.txt<\/p>\n
\n
\n!
\n01
\n101
\n22
\na
\nant
\nimportation
\nlewis
\nlouise
\ntender
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nsort tosort0.txt
\n<\/span><\/p>\n