Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nih-csl!lhc!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to sort on exactly one field only
Message-ID: <14249@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 26 Oct 90 05:42:05 GMT
References: <1094@massey.ac.nz> <1757@b15.INGR.COM>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 8

In article <1757@b15.INGR.COM> rob@b15.INGR.COM (Rob Lemley) writes:
>The man page clearly states that you cannot cause sort to ignore a field
>or preserve relative line ordering.

"sort" does ignore non-key fields except when keys compare equal.
To obtain a stable sort, add line numbers, sort on the keys you
wanted followed by the line numbers as an additional key, then
strip off the line numbers.