topic Re: sorting question in Operating System - HP-UX

sorting question

dictum9 — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:15:45 GMT

I want to sort output by the certain column, ie. 4th column. From the man page, the necessary option seems to be -k, so that

cat file | sort -k 5

It sorts it in a different way but it doesn't work. Neither does

cat file | sort -k 5.3

Re: sorting question

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:25:16 GMT

Several things could be wrong. 1) You haven't specified what the separator charactor is so that is the 5th field may not be what sort thinks is the 5th field. Ialso you may need a type specifier such as -k 5n,5 to force numeric comparisons rather than lexical comparisons. For example, if 'n' were not used (and assumming this us the 5th field)
1
2
3
10
20
100

would actually be sorted as

1
10
100
2
20
3

Re: sorting question

Patrick Wallek — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:25:32 GMT

Can you show us a sample of the file you want to sort? Just a few lines will do. This may help in figuring out how to get it sorted.

Re: sorting question

Sung Oh — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:26:33 GMT

if you are sorting by 4th column, you should use

cat file | sort -k 4

if this still does not work can you print the outout to here?

Sung

Re: sorting question

Ivan Ferreira — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:32:16 GMT

I just use:

cat file | sort +3

Because the columns starts at 0. If you are doinig numeric sorting, use -n, like this:

cat file | sort +3 -nb

Re: sorting question

dictum9 — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:53:39 GMT

-n flag does the trick, thanks.

( As usual, the man page is cryptic )

Re: sorting question

Arturo Galbiati — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 03:36:34 GMT

Hi,
why not sort -n +3 file avoiding cat?
HTH,
Art