Often you may want to use Bash to sort an array of strings that contain numbers.
You can use the sort statement with the version-sort option to do so:
printf '%s\n' "${athletes[@]}" | sort --version-sort
This particular example will sort the strings in the array named athletes based on both characters and numeric values.
You can also use the shorthand notation sort -V if you’d like:
printf '%s\n' "${athletes[@]}" | sort -V
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Sort Strings with Numbers in Bash
Suppose that we create the following array in Bash named athletes that contains strings that represent ID numbers for various athletes:
athletes=(ID4 ID15 ID7 ID23 ID104 ID28 ID35)
Suppose that we would like to sort the strings in this array.
Suppose we attempt to use the sort statement by itself:
printf '%s\n' "${athletes[@]}" | sort
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that the numbers are not sorted in the correct order.
Instead, we must specify the version-sort option when sorting:
printf '%s\n' "${athletes[@]}" | sort --version-sort
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that the numbers are now sorted from smallest to largest since we specified version-sort when using the sort statement.
We could also sort based on the numbers from largest to smallest by adding the -r option (“reverse”) at the end:
printf '%s\n' "${athletes[@]}" | sort --version-sort -r
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that the strings are now sorted based on the numbers from largest to smallest.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Remove Last Element from Array
Bash: How to Get the Index of an Item in Array
Bash: How to Find Minimum and Maximum Values in Array
