How to Sort IP Addresses with a Simple Shell Script

In daily operations we often need to manage and sort IP addresses for log analysis, traffic monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Given a sample list of ten unsorted IPs, we create a Bash script sort_ips.sh that reads the list from /mnt/data/ip.txt and writes the numerically sorted result to /mnt/data/sorted_ip.txt using the command:

#!/bin/bash

# Define input and output files
input_file="/mnt/data/ip.txt"
output_file="/mnt/data/sorted_ip.txt"

# Sort IP addresses numerically by each octet
sort -n -t . -k 1,1 -k 2,2 -k 3,3 -k 4,4 $input_file > $output_file

# Display the sorted IPs
cat $output_file

The -n option forces numeric sorting, -t . sets the dot as the field delimiter, and the series of -k options sort each octet in order.

After granting execution permission ( chmod +x sort_ips.sh) and running the script ( ./sort_ips.sh), the sorted_ip.txt file contains the IPs in proper order:

3.252.10.92
10.184.34.10
33.46.4.10
35.185.72.151
83.91.145.234
83.119.149.68
103.187.9.50
184.142.237.167
193.232.67.195
217.40.57.147

-n sorts numerically; -t . sets the delimiter; -k 1,1 -k 2,2 -k 3,3 -k 4,4 sorts each octet individually; $input_file is the source file; $output_file receives the sorted output; cat $output_file displays the result.

This example shows how a short shell script can reliably sort IP addresses, a technique that can be extended to other text‑data sorting tasks in system administration.