Question

for example if we have in a variable named “var”

a string “2.test 1.test 9.test”

i want it to be

1.test 2.test 9.test

I was trying to apply this command

    echo $var | sort -n

but the output isn’t correct because if for example I have

2.text
11.text

it will print

11.text 2.text which is wrong because 11>2

thanks

Answer 1

sort works on lines, not words.

For the example you’ve shown us, you’re sorting a single line of text. For example:

$ echo 2.text 11.text 3.text | sort -n
2.text 11.text 3.text

But that’s inconsistent with the output you’ve shown us, so I can’t be sure just what you’re doing, or what you’re trying to do.

Are you looking for something like this?

$ echo 2.text 11.text 3.text | fmt -1
2.text
11.text
3.text
$ echo 2.text 11.text 3.text | fmt -1 | sort -n
2.text
3.text
11.text

And do you need to re-assemble the lines into a single line? Piping the output through fmt -999 will do that, but that’s a bit ugly (GNU coreutils fmt limits the width to 2500).