sorting ls-l owners in Unix

Question

I want to sort the owners in alphabetical order from a call to ls -l and cannot figure out a way to do it. I know something like ls-l | sort would sort the file name but how do i sort the owners in order?

Answer 1

The owner is the third field, so use -k 3:

ls -l | sort -k 3

You can extend this idea to sorting based on other fields, and you can have multiple -k options. For instance, maybe you want to sort by owner, and then size in descending order:

ls -l | sort -k 3,3 -k 5rn