Sort uniq IP address in from Apache log

Question

I'm trying to extract IP addresses from my apache log, count them, and sort them.

And for whatever reason, the sorting part is horrible.

Here is the command:

cat access.* | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n 

Output example:

  16789 65.X.X.X   19448 65.X.X.X    1995 138.X.X.X    2407 213.X.X.X    2728 213.X.X.X    5478 188.X.X.X    6496 176.X.X.X   11332 130.X.X.X 

I don't understand why these values aren't really sorted. I've also tried to remove blanks at the start of the line (sed 's/^[\t ]*//g') and using sort -n -t" " -k1, which doesn't change anything.

Any hint ?

Answer 1

This may be late, but using the numeric in the first sort will give you the desired result,

cat access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20 

Output:

 29877 93.xxx.xxx.xxx   17538 80.xxx.xxx.xxx    5895 198.xxx.xxx.xxx    3042 37.xxx.xxx.xxx    2956 208.xxx.xxx.xxx    2613 94.xxx.xxx.xxx    2572 89.xxx.xxx.xxx    2268 94.xxx.xxx.xxx    1896 89.xxx.xxx.xxx    1584 46.xxx.xxx.xxx    1402 208.xxx.xxx.xxx    1273 93.xxx.xxx.xxx    1054 208.xxx.xxx.xxx     860 162.xxx.xxx.xxx     830 208.xxx.xxx.xxx     606 162.xxx.xxx.xxx     545 94.xxx.xxx.xxx     480 37.xxx.xxx.xxx     446 162.xxx.xxx.xxx     398 162.xxx.xxx.xxx