Shell Programming and Scripting

@urfrnddpk: Seriously? Did that work? Can you post the output you're getting on your system?

This is what I'm getting:

Code:

$ echo "12319999\n01012013\n12312011\n01012011" |sort -k1.4 -k5
12319999\n01012013\n12312011\n01012011

My system is:

Code:

$ uname -a
Linux <host_name> 2.6.18-53.el5 #1 SMP Wed Oct 10 16:34:19 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

if the input is(mmddyyyy) :
12012012
22112011
01122011

then it is not working fine. 12012012 should come either in first position or in last .

your logic is working fine in case of yyyymmdd format .

---------- Post updated at 01:40 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:35 PM ----------

hello

i am using HP UNIX and the output i am getting is :
01012011
12312011
01012013
12319999
but when i am trying a different input like :
echo "12012012\n01122011\n22112011"|sort -k1.4 -k5
the output is totally different
output is :
22112011
12012012
01122011

according to my requirment 12012012 should come either in first position or in last position ..
can you help please?

@urfrnddpk: Is there anyway to tell if the input is in DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYYY? Or will your input be a mix of DDMMYYYY, MMDDYYYY and YYYYMMDD? If your input contains 01062011 and 04022011 can you think of a way to make the computer understand that it is 1st of June, 2011 and April 2nd, 2011.

actually it is a mix of mmddyyyy and yyyymmdd. but somehow i can distinguish these two formats . the logic(-k1.4 -k5) is working fine in yyyymmdd format and am getting the latest date in the end of output .
but in ddmmyyyy the results are different .

and i don't know any such methode so that i can convert these date format into any another date format

Ok. So assuming your input has only MMDDYYYY and YYYYMMDD, you can replace this:

Code:

y=`echo $x | cut -c7-8``echo $x | cut -c5-6``echo $x | cut -c1-4`

with this:

Code:

y=`echo $x | cut -c5-6``echo $x | cut -c7-8``echo $x | cut -c1-4`

And in the last line of script, use sort -nr ..... to reverse sort the output.