Text files can be written easily by Spark.

To write an RDD to a text file, each element on a line, the method sc.writeTextFile can be used:

lines.saveAsTextFile("output_path")

The output_path always specifies a directory in which several output files are created. If the output directory already exists, an error occurs.

Several output files, named part-00000, part-00001, etc., are created in the output directory, one for

If you want the output to be sorted, use sortBy method. The sortBy method must be given a lambda function which extracts from a given element a key, which is used during sorting. The elements are sorted in ascending order, but named parameter ascending with false value can be specified.
Python version:

lines.sortBy(lambda line: line)  # Sort whole lines
lines.sortBy(lambda (k, v): k)   # Sort pairs according to the first element
lines.sortBy(lambda line: line, ascending=False) # Sort in decreasing order

Scala version:

lines.sortBy(line=>line)      # Sort whole lines
lines.sortBy(line=>line._1)   # Sort pairs according to the first element
lines.sortBy(line=>line, ascending=false) # Sort in decreasing order