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From: suhre@ondine.dsd.trw.com (Maurice E. Suhre)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: How to sort on right most column
Message-ID: <1991May17.164744.5668@gumby.dsd.TRW.COM>
Date: 17 May 91 16:47:44 GMT
References: <13320@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: news@gumby.dsd.TRW.COM
Reply-To: suhre@ondine.dsd.trw.com.UUCP (Maurice E. Suhre)
Organization: TRW Space and Defense
Lines: 21

In article <13320@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> rock@warp.Eng.Sun.COM (Bill Petro) writes:
>
>How could I do this using either the sort command, or perl or awk?
>
>I have the following data in this format - I want to sort it on the
>right most column.  
	[Most of data file deleted for brevity]
> FOO  BAR CITIBANK N. A.                 ANDOVER                4.00
> FOO  BAR CITIBANK NORTH AMERICA         LONG ISLAND CITY      26.00
>
I haven't seen an awk solution yet, so here's one.  The strategy is
to generate a line which has the last field duplicated in front and
uses a different field separator.  I selected the "plus" sign.  There
needs to be some character which is not found in the data file.

#! /bin/sh
# 
awk '{print $NF "+" $0}' | sort -n -t+ +0 -1 ,t1 | awk -F+ '{ print $2}' 
-- 
Maurice Suhre
suhre@trwrb.dsd.trw.com