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I want to sort a file in unix shell. Can I redirect my result into my input file?

e.g. if my input file is foo then can I use

 sort foo > foo

or I should use: 

 sort -o foo foo

What would be difference between above two?

Thanks,

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1 Answer 1

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9

Use

sort -o foo foo

From the man page:

-o OUTPUT-FILE' Write output to OUTPUT-FILE instead of standard output. If OUTPUT-FILE is one of the input files,sort' copies it to a temporary file before sorting and writing the output to OUTPUT-FILE.

sort foo > foo means writing output to the standard output which is redirected to the output file. Before redirecting, > will truncate/overwrite the output file if one is exist. Since both the input and output files are same, you will lose the input file information.

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