PACSORT(8)

📦 version 1.13.1, in arch rolling

💅 PACSORT(8) — the pacman-contrib manual, but make it cute

okay so bestie, you're looking at pacsort, section 8 of the pacman-contrib manual, and honestly? she's iconic. let me tell you everything 💖

✨ NAME ✨

pacsort — a sort utility that implements alpm_pkg_vercmp. yes, that's the whole vibe: sorting, but the Arch way 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pacsort [options] [files ...]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the tea: pacsort concatenates the files you give it, sorts them, and writes the whole thing out to standard output. and the default order? oldest to newest, periodt. ⭐

when you don't give her any files at all, she just reads from standard input, ngl that's so considerate of her 🫶

and by default, the lines are treated as lists of plain version strings. plain. simple. lowkey elegant. ✨

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -f, --files — use this when your input lists are in the *-*.pkg.tar* format, and she'll sort the lines by pkgname and pkgver. chef's kiss 🔥
  • -h, --help — displays the syntax and all the command-line options. literally the "help me help you" flag 🙈
  • -k, --key <index> — sorts the input starting on the specified column. pick your main character column 👑
  • -z, --null — lines end with null bytes instead of newlines. yes bestie, null bytes, we love a delimiter moment 💀
  • -r, --reverse — sorts in reverse order. backwards but make it fashion 🦋
  • -t, --separator <sep> — sets the field separator. the default separator is space. hmu with your own if space isn't your thing ✨
  • -V, --version — displays the version. gotta know which queen you're running 💖

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

pacman(8), vercmp(8) — go read those too, iykyk 🧚

💀 BUGS 💀

bugs? bestie. you must be kidding. there are no bugs in this software. like, none. zero. not a single one. 😭

but okay, if we happen to be wrong (and like… hypothetically… we could be 👀), file an issue with as much detail as possible right here:

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman-contrib/-/issues/new

the more detail the better — we're nosy and we want the full story 🍓

🎀 AUTHORS 🎀

current maintainers, the actual icons:

  • Johannes Löthberg <johannes@kyriasis.com>
  • Daniel M. Capella <polyzen@archlinux.org>

and for all the additional contributors out there (you know who you are 🫶), just run git shortlog -s on the pacman-contrib.git repository and you'll see everyone who helped make this happen 💜

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was Pacman-contrib version 1.13.1, dated 2025-12-11 — slay, go sort something, mwah 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from