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Accepted
Smile.Hunter
Asked: 2012-07-20 04:00:23 +0800 CST

How do I sort a wordlist by string length?

  • 772

There is a wordlist look like this;

123
b
1
4rr
f
k3j3
gg

Then I needed to sort these words by string length (doesn't matter which start with numeric or string both are okay)

The output should be this:

b
1
f
gg
123
4rr
4rr

Is there a sort command that allows me to do this?

text-processing

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I assume you want to do this on the command-line.

    Most command line tools work in a line-based manner, so it is straightforward with awk, sort and cut, see for example this other question:

    awk '{ print length, $0 }' testfile | sort -n | cut -d" " -f2-

    Breakdown:

    # Print line-length and the line
awk '{ print length, $0 }' testfile |

# Sort numerically by line-length
sort -n |

# Remove line-length number
cut -d' ' -f2-

    Output:

    1
b
f
gg
123
4rr
k3j3

    See man awk, info sort and info cut for more.

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