This is the question being asked: (Sort your data file by last name first, then by the first name second – save as first_last.) I am not quite sure of the type of sort I am being asked to perform. I have read the man pages of the sort command a few times, as well as searching online for possible solutions and I have found neither. Here's an example file with which I have come up with to try and solve the above:

sort -nrk3 phone_list.txt > first_last
Mark Jacobs 01
Mark Davis 03
Kerry Wild 05
Parker Jacobs 08

Valencia Community College. Orlando, FL USA. Prof. D. Weeks. COP-2341-12143.

I think it can't be achieved with single sort run. This works, but I don't know if it is not too complicated for your course. Anyway here it is:

awk '{print $2}' filename | sort | uniq | while read last_name; do awk -vn=$last_name '$2==n' filename | sort -k1; done

I tried your script but when I pipe file 1 into file 2 I get fatal cannot open file 2 for reading(no such file or directory). I created file 2 & tried it again after the error to see if it would work but it still failed to pipe into file 2. I initially thought awk was the solution also but this is an introductory Linux course so I felt the same way you did about the complexity of the question. Thanks for your help. I'll keep trying and hopefully I'll get it soon.

To pipe the output to another file:

awk '{print $2}' filename | sort | uniq | while read last_name; do awk -vn=$last_name '$2==n' filename | sort -k1; done > first_last

I must be missing something very basic here. Assuming that the first field in your input file is the first name and the second field in your input file is the last name, why isn't:

sort -k2 phone_list.txt > first_last

Try running that code on a bit modified input:

Mark Jacobs 01
Mark Davis 03
Kerry Wild 05
Parker Jacobs 08
Adam Jacobs 08

You're right. I'm not doing well today... Once more: