Sort problem

[maberg]

I have a fixed file length, with embedded spaces.
I am trying to sort on the employee number in column 10-19, but I get undesirable results.

File is (file.txt):
1998945 Warble
8 5032 Rebholz
1124688 Barrera
2327703 Rebholz

Result is:
1998945 Warble
8 5032 Rebholz
1124688 Barrera
2327703 Rebholz

Command script is:

export LC_COLLATE=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_MESSAGES=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_MONETARY=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_NUMERIC=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_TIME=en_US.ISO8859-1

sort -t# -k1.10n,1.19n file.txt -o test.sorted

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Posting a textual attachment of the input file would be more helpful.

Regards!

...JRF...

[maberg]

I have uploaded the input and sorted files.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

You have unequal numbers of fields as shown with the record with an "8" as the first field.

You could do:

# awk '{if (NF>2) {print $2,$0} else {print $1,$0}}' file|sort -kn1,1|cut -d" " -f2-

...which produces:

8 5032 Rebholz
1124688 Barrera
1998945 Warble
2327703 Rebholz

Regards!

...JRF...

[maberg]

Thanks for the input, but I am trying to use the sort utility only. I need to apply this to a larger file with the same key information. I used this smaller file for simplicity. This smaller file had the same issues as the larger file.

[V. Nyga]

Hi,

maybe you made it more complicate then simply?
Where does the '8' comes from?
Is it the last number of the previous column?
Can you give a better sample?

Volkmar

[Mel Burslan]

I don't believe you can sort the file sample you gave in the way you expect it to be sorted using just sort command. Sort command does depend on a field separator, which is a space or a tab character unless otherwise specified.

In your example, you are expecting sort to recognize a certain range of characters (say 10-to-19 for the employee number) as a field. It is not going to happen as far as my understanding of sort man pages go.

You will need to use some interim parsing of the input file, otherwise all the spaces trailing any line, in the first field is going to be interpreted as a field separator and your first key field for sort is going to be the employee number, whereas when the line starts with that digit "8" your employee number will be key field 2. So, as JRF said, you have non-uniform fields for sort to interpret. And to be perfectly honest, JRF's solution, using awk in conjunction with sort is the most elegant solution you can come up with in your case. If the pipes in that command chain is not working due to the large input file size, the only thing you can do is to parse that command into separate commands and create interim files as you go. That should give you some flexibility.

[maberg]

The "8" is another data component in column 1. It is just a data item. Other data characters can be accounted for in column 1 - 9, but not always.

[Mel Burslan]

In order to understand what I mean by the non-uniform fields, do this simple exercise:

$ cat myinputfile | while read line ; do
f1=`echo $line |cut -c 1-9`
f2=`echo $line |cut -c 10-19`
f3=`echo $line |cut -c 20-`
echo $f1","$f2","$f3
done

and see where the character counted fileds are being cut-off.

Hence the need for some external utility like awk to force them to unformity

[Tingli]

You can try:

sort -t# -k1.10nb,1.19nbb file.txt -o test.sorted