Sorting with non- and alphanumeric characters

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi guys, I'm new to this forum and I'm not a UNIX expert. I can't figure out this certain problem i'm having:

I need to sort some words, some of the words are annotations (enclosed within < and >). I need to have them sorted alphabetically with all non-alphanumeric characters up front. For example:

aardvark
add
<ahem>
blue
<burst-into-laughter>
...
zebra

I want it to become:
<ahem>
<burst-into-laughter>
aardvark
add
blue
and so on...

I've tried different options written on the man page for sort (like numeric and general-numeric sorting) but any of those just doesn't do what I want. What happens is that they all ignore the < and > signs. Please help me.

2

Works for me.

$
$ cat f2
aardvark
add
<ahem>
blue
<burst-into-laughter>
zebra
$
$
$ sort f2
<ahem>
<burst-into-laughter>
aardvark
add
blue
zebra
$

tyler_durden

3

my shell must be f*cked up. thanks anyway :smiley: