Hey Don I think your right. I used that solution first but I felt it was too trivial initially. Now thinking about it again, I definitely think I read into the question a bit much. Thank you for your help. @bartus11 I will definitely try your script again and or use it for further reference. Thanks a lot.

There are some "sort" intrinsics to be considered and i think you haven't covered them all yet. This might not have any impact on your test file, but may well change the sorting order in another sample.

Lets see:

The default behavior of "sort" is to sort from the field/position given in te argument to the "-k" option to the end of line. That means:

sort -k 2 /some/file

sort -k 2,2 -k 1,1

Very close... According to the standards (and the sort utilities I've used tend to follow the standards pretty closely), what you said about sort -k 2 is exactly correct. But, sort -k 2,2 sorts on the 2nd field and if two or more lines compare equal on that field, the entire line is used as the secondary sort key. So sort -k 2,2 performs exactly the same sort as sort -k 2,2 -k 1,1 .

Thanks everyone. I appreciate your help.