How do I sort a wordlist by string length?

Question

There is a wordlist look like this;

123
b
1
4rr
f
k3j3
gg

Then I needed to sort these words by string length (doesn't matter which start with numeric or string both are okay)

The output should be this:

b
1
f
gg
123
4rr
4rr

Is there a sort command that allows me to do this?

Answer 1

I assume you want to do this on the command-line.

Most command line tools work in a line-based manner, so to do this you first need to convert the wordlist into lines, this is easily done with tr ' ' '\n', which transliterates all spaces into new-lines. Then use the solution described here to sort by line length. Finally convert back to single line with paste.

echo 123 b 1 4rr f k3j3 gg   \
| tr ' ' '\n' < wordlist     \
| awk '{ print length, $0 }' \
| sort -n | cut -d' ' -f2    \
| paste -s -d ' '

Output:

1 b f gg 123 4rr k3j3

See info tr, man awk, info sort, info cut and info paste for more.