Since this is posted this on unix.stackexchange.com, I am going to assume that you have access to the usual unix tools.
Alphabetic sorting on first column:
$ sort file.txt >alpha_sorted.txt $ cat alpha_sorted.txt d 29 d 5 d 9 f 2 f 2 g 1 g 10 g 5 h 1 s 4 s 5 Numeric sorting:
$ sort -nk2 file.txt >numbers_sorted.txt $ cat numbers_sorted.txt g 1 h 1 f 2 f 2 s 4 d 5 g 5 s 5 d 9 g 10 d 29 -n specifies numeric sorting. -k2 specifies sorting on the second column.
For more information, see man sort.