Sort lines

Tip 1166 Printable Monobook Previous Next

created March 9, 2006 · complexity basic · author Robert Stovall · version 5.7

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This is just a reminder of how to take advantage of existing Vim capability. I had not needed to sort before and took a few minutes to find a good example.

Sort lines in Vim using blocks:

:<range>!sort

Yes, it's that simple.

Key strokes:

• Place cursor at first line of range to be sorted.
• Use marker (ma) to mark starting point
• Go to last line of range to be sorted
• Issue command from marker (a) to here with :'a,.!sort

See also

• 374 Use filter commands to process text
• 588 How to sort using visual blocks
• 758 Search and sort by selection
• 800 Sorting lines in a file based on the number of words in each line
• 923 Sort lines by a specified word number
• 1148 Unique sorting

References

• :help :sort

Comments

 TO DO 
Update tip for Vim 7. It is now almost always better to use the :sort command that is built into Vim: Use flag n to sort numerically or u to keep unique lines.

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Press V and highlight the lines you want (instead of marks), then :!sort.

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Note that for Vim <7, this uses the external sort program. This has some consequences:

• The program must be installed (which it usually is).
• Options can be passed to it.

which means you can do (for example)

:!sort -n

to sort numerically,

:!sort -k2

to sort on the second field, etc.

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Just to point out that sort is a *nix utility. Windows users will need to get sort.exe from http://www.cygwin.com/ or http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

To sort whole file, and delete duplicates

:%!sort -u

the ! here means access external utility

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To remove duplicate lines from a sorted list (make each line unique):

:%s/^\(.*\)\(\n\1\n\)\+/\1/g

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