awk has the facility to use multiple delimiters awk -F'[-.]' '{print $(NF-1), $0}' Does not look like "sort" supports multiple delimiters.
If "sort" did support multiple delimiters, I could numerically sort the following set of filenames using the second field. schimmel-04.png schimmel-05.png schimmel-06.png schimmel-07.png schimmel-08.png schimmel-09.png schimmel-10.png schimmel-11.png schimmel-12.png schimmel-13.png schimmel-1.png schimmel-2.png schimmel-3.png