Fortunately, Linux has a great equivalent command: sort. Like cut and awk, you can specify a delimiter and field by number, although the flags use different letters.

Whenever you have a text file of any kind with uniform delimiters, you can sort the data on any particular column with the sort command.

Notice that the output displays the list of characters in the selected file in alphanumeric order thanks to the sort command.

Getting started with Linux can be more than a little daunting. In this article we help you learn the commands needed to find your way around and teach you how to find out more on your own.