Sorting words in lines in a file and output sorted lines again

Question

I want to sort the words on lines in a file line by line and I want the ouptut to be lines with the words sorted alphabetically.

for example:

queue list word letter gum  
another line of example words  
...

I want the output to be:

gum letter list queue word  
another example line of words  
...  

I can't seem to get it to work via commandline

I'm overlooking things probably

Answer 1

If you have perl installed:

perl -ne 'print join " ", sort split /\s/ ; print "\n"'

EX:

cat input | perl -ne 'print join " ", sort split /\s/ ; print "\n"' > output

Answer 2

If the file with the list of words is foo.txt:

while read line; do
  echo $(for w in $(echo "$line"); do echo "$w"; done |sort);
done < foo.txt

Answer 3

This works for me:

while read line
do
echo $line | tr " " "\n" | sort | tr "\n" " " ;echo
done < "input"

The idea is to:

• read the file line by line
• for each line read, replace space with newline
• sort the resultant list
• replace newline with space and
• print

Answer 4

With awk only:

gawk '{
    split($0, a)
    asort(a)
    for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) printf("%s ", a[i])
    print ""
}' infile