How to sort characters in a string?

Question

I would like to sort the characters in a string.

E.g.

echo cba | sort-command abc 

Is there a command that will allow me to do this or will I have to write an awk script to iterate over the string and sort it?

Answer 1

echo cba | grep -o . | sort |tr -d "\n" 

Answer 2

Please find the following useful methods:

Shell

Sort string based on its characters:

echo cba | grep -o . | sort | tr -d "\n" 

String separated by spaces:

echo 'dd aa cc bb' | tr " " "\n" | sort | tr "\n" " " 

Perl

print (join "", sort split //,$_) 

Ruby

ruby -e 'puts "dd aa cc bb".split(/\s+/).sort'  

Bash

With bash you have to enumerate each character from a string, in general something like:

str="dd aa cc bb"; for (( i = 0; i < ${#str[@]}; i++ )); do echo "${str[$i]}"; done 

For sorting array, please check: How to sort an array in bash?