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From: quan@sol.surv.utas.oz (Stephen Quan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to sort on exactly one field only
Message-ID: <quan.656735656@sol>
Date: 24 Oct 90 02:34:16 GMT
References: <1094@massey.ac.nz>
Sender: news@diemen.utas.edu.au
Followup-To: comp.unix.shell
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ARaman@massey.ac.nz (Anand Venkata Raman) writes:

>I want to sort a file exclusively on field #2.
>For example,
>A portion of the file looks like
>appl1  3  Submitted
>appl2  4  Submitted
>appl1  3  Started
>appl3  5  Submitted
>appl2  4  Started
>appl1  3  Finished(0)
>appl2  4  Finished(7)
>appl3  5  Started
>appl3  5  Finished(3)

In the bourne shell (sh) :

cat -n file | awk "{print \$3,\$1,\$2,\$4}" | sort | awk "{print \$3,\$1,\$4}"
- line numbers are added
- arguments are rearrange so :
- sort is done on first preference your key, second preference line numbers
- remove the line# are rearrange arguments back

I think I am missing some argument to 'sort' to make it interpret the line
numbers as numbers - not just text.

Stephen Quan,
University of Tasmania.