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If you know your spreadsheet tool you probably think this post is rather useless. I like doing things on the command line and so I felt it important to find out how a CSV file can be sorted thereon.(In my case I got a CSV file containing a memory report of a redis instance.)

So - as expected - sort can help us with this. With no arguments it just sorts its input alphabetically. But it can also work on character-separated files. With the --field-separator flag you can tell sort what to separate on. I suspect tab is the default here as I found out last year for the read command. Also you often want to do a numeric sort and for the you can use the -n flag. Finally you may want to sort on a column in the middle of things. The --key flag helps with that. It actually accepts a range so passing in a 3 sorts on everything from the third column to the end of line. To limit it to a single column 3,3 is needed. Also note that columns start on 1 which probably is good for nondeveloper users but left me puzzled for a while. An example call:

sort --field-separator=',' --key=2,2 -n some-file.csv | less

To get larger numbers first - add -r for reverse.