TSORT(1)

✨ TSORT(1) — like, the topological sort era ✨

okay bestie, sit DOWN, because this one is a whole vibe 💅 it lives in the GNU coreutils world and it goes by tsort, which is short for topological sort — yes it's giving algorithms-class but make it cute 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

tsort — perform topological sort

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

tsort [OPTION] [FILE]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So the whole plot twist here: tsort writes a totally ordered list that's consistent with the partial ordering sitting in FILE. Like, you hand it a bunch of "this comes before that" crumbs, and it hands you back one long line of "here's literally everyone, in an order that doesn't break a single one of your rules" 🔥 no cap.

If you don't give it a FILE — or if FILE is - — it just reads standard input. So you can pipe right into it, main character energy 🫶

The options are short but iconic:

• --help — display this help and exit 💫
• --version — output version information and exit ⭐

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Written by Mark Kettenis.

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💀 REPORTING BUGS 💀

Found a bug? Don't put that in the group chat, put it in the inbox bestie 😭:

• Report bugs to: bug-coreutils@gnu.org
• GNU coreutils home page: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
• General help using GNU software: <https://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>
• Report any translation bugs to <https://translationproject.org/team/>

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🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

• Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/tsort>
• or available locally via: info '(coreutils) tsort invocation'

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🌈 and the legal-ish outro, because she's an icon 🌈

Packaged by Ubuntu (9.10-1ubuntu2).

Copyright © 2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

fr fr, no warranty — read that part twice 💜

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GNU coreutils 9.10 · August 2026 · TSORT(1) — mwah, slay, go sort something topologically 🦋✨