Ever needed to sort a list of IP-Addresses in Powershell?

Say we have a list of IP-Addresses like this:

$IPaddresslist = @(
    '1.2.3.4'
    '220.2.240.250'
    '20.30.40.50'
    '3.5.7.9'
    '220.230.240.250'
)

The result of a normal sort is:

$IPaddresslist | Sort-Object
1.2.3.4
20.30.40.50
220.2.240.250
220.230.240.250
3.5.7.9

That’s a nice alphabetical sort but not really what you want for IP-Addresses.

So how do we solve this problem?

IP-Addresses, like version numbers, consist of four groups of numbers seperated by a dot.

So if we treat an IP-Adress as if it was a version number we can do this:

$IPaddresslist | Sort-Object -Property { [version]$_ }
1.2.3.4
3.5.7.9
20.30.40.50
220.2.240.250
220.230.240.250

But an IP Adress is not a version number, so is there another way to do this?

Yes there is, we can use [ipaddress] instead of [version], When using the Address property it has the same effect and is much clearer in the code because everyone can understand what it means.

$IPaddresslist | Sort-Object -Property { ([ipaddress]$_).Address }
1.2.3.4
3.5.7.9
20.30.40.50
220.2.240.250
220.230.240.250

As you can see we now have a perfectly sorted list of IP-Addresses.