Sort Lines Alphabetically

A plain alphabetical sort compares text character by character, which produces a distinctly unhelpful result for any list containing numbered items: "item10" sorts before "item2" under strict character comparison, because the character "1" comes before "2" regardless of what follows it — the sort has no concept that "10" as a whole number is larger than "2." Natural-order sorting compares embedded numeric sequences as actual numbers rather than as strings of digit characters, so item2 correctly precedes item10, matching how a person reading the list would expect it ordered.

This distinction is invisible on purely alphabetic lists — plain words sort identically either way — and becomes obvious the moment a list mixes text with numbers: file names with sequence numbers, version identifiers, or any label following a "prefix + number" pattern.

Doing both in the same pass is the efficient choice when a list needs both operations anyway, but they are logically independent settings and can be used alone — sorting without deduplication is useful for a list known to have no repeats that simply needs ordering, and deduplication without sorting is the right choice when the original sequence carries meaning worth keeping, such as a log or a chronologically assembled list where alphabetising would destroy information the order was encoding.