I’m trying to extract IP addresses from my apache log, count and sort them.
Using the numeric in the first sort will give you the desired result:
cat access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20
15 212.XXX.XXX.XXX
2 198.XXX.XXX.XXX
1 216.XXX.XXX.XXX
1 139.XXX.XXX.XXX
10 51.XXX.XXX.XXX
2 37.XXX.XXX.XXX
1 76.XXX.XXX.XXX
1 74.XXX.XXX.XXX
1 51.XXX.XXX.XXX