Sort each line in a text file

Question

I have a text file which contains on each line some words, for example:

stackoverflow coding programming
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I must sort each line and preserve the order of lines. For example, for the above example the output should be:

coding programming stackoverflow
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My solution until now is to create a temp file, in which all the lines are sorted. The bash script looks like this:

FILE_TMP=$FILE".tmp" 
while read line
do
echo $line | xargs -n1 | sort | xargs >>$FILE_TMP
done < $FILE

mv $FILE_TMP $FILE

It works fine, but I'm not pleased that I must create a duplicate file, especially because the files are big.

So, my question is there any solution to sort in place each line of the file?

Thank you,

Answer 1

Try this (You may have to change the sed if file is not space separated):

cat datafile.dat | while read line; do echo $line | sed 's/ /\n/g' | sort | gawk '{line=line " " $0} END {print line}' ; done