Technology Insights

CentOS Linux: sort: invalid option — R, Try sort –help for more information

InsightsLeave a comment

I was working on an article a couple days ago with a friend and he had sent over some commands for me to reference in the article which included the “sort -R” command. The sort -R switch will randomly sort the contents of a file which is very useful in certain situations. The problem is that the sort command which is installed by the coreutils RPM package on CentOS does not include the -R switch because it is to old. Below I describe the issue in more detail and provide references on how you could upgrade sort on CentOS Linux.

Technology Insights

Install Or Upgrade One Application From coreutils Package On CentOS Linux

Insights4 Comments

Yesterday I needed to upgrade a single application on CentOS Linux. First I figured out that the application was part of the coreutils RPM package which is currently only available up to version coreutils 5.97-23 on CentOS. The current coreutils package is already up to coreutils 8.5 and upgrading coreutils is near impossible on CentOS because of other package requirements that it needs. Below are instructions on how to download the coreutils source, build the coreutils applications in a new directory, and then upgrade one application.

Technology Insights

Find Out What Applications Are Installed From An RPM Package On Linux

InsightsLeave a comment

Earlier today I was upgrading some packages on a CentOS Linux server and was curious what applications were actually installed with the coreutils RPM package. I knew that this was one of the main RPM packages that had a ton of various applications installed with it however I was not sure specifically which ones. Below are some examples of how to use RPM to find out exactly what is installed with a specific RPM package.

Technology Insights

What Linux RPM Package Installs Sort

InsightsLeave a comment

Earlier today I ran into an issue where I needed an updated version of “sort” on a server running CentOS 5.4. Since sort is not a package available via yum I needed to first find out what Linux RPM package includes sort to see if there was an upgrade available. To find this out you can use yum as shown in the example below.

Technology Insights

CentOS Linux: What RPM Package Installs the “ls” Command?

InsightsLeave a comment

I recently noticed a difference of the output from the “ls” command between servers so I wanted to update the package on each server to make sure I was comparing apples to apples. I knew that “ls” was part of a grouping of utilities but wasn’t sure which package. You can use the info command to find out more about a specific Linux command as shown below. Only the first paragraph is shown in the output since its pages long.