You can’t sort a markdown table perfectly with sort alone, but you could either manually edit the first to lines or combine with head and tail to get mostly there.
| Fruit | Type |
| ------ | ------ |
| Orange | Citrus |
| Apple | - |
| Banana | - |
| Lemon | Citrus |
| Mango | - |
To get the header:
head -n 2 Table.md > Table.sorted.md
Sort the body:
tail -n +3 Table.md | sort -t'|' -k2 --ignore-case >> Table.sorted.md
You’ll get a good result:
cat Table.sorted.md
| Fruit | Type |
| ------ | ------ |
| Apple | - |
| Banana | - |
| Lemon | Citrus |
| Mango | - |
| Orange | Citrus |
Using only Unix sort
Set the delimeter to |: -t'|'
The 1st column will actually be the 2nd column: -k2.
sort -t'|' -k2 --ignore-case Table.md
| ------ | ------ |
| Apple | - |
| Banana | - |
| Fruit | Type |
| Lemon | Citrus |
| Mango | - |
| Orange | Citrus |
And with a tiny bit of manual editing:
| Fruit | Type |
| ------ | ------ |
| Apple | - |
| Banana | - |
| Lemon | Citrus |
| Mango | - |
| Orange | Citrus |
The 2nd column will actually be the 3rd column: -k3.
sort -t'|' -k3 --ignore-case Table.md
| Apple | - |
| Banana | - |
| Mango | - |
| ------ | ------ |
| Lemon | Citrus |
| Orange | Citrus |
| Fruit | Type |
Again, manually fix the header and delimiting row:
| Fruit | Type |
| ------ | ------ |
| Apple | - |
| Banana | - |
| Mango | - |
| Lemon | Citrus |
| Orange | Citrus |