Shell Programming and Scripting

@whyte_rhino
There are rules for posting homework of which the O/P will be aware. Otherwise we assume a commercial environment.
This situation with weird sorts is often reached after poor system design.

On re-reading, I see that you know a filename which did not appear in post #1. Either a tutor or a someone working on the same problem?

Methyl, appreciate the help, however I did have that sort the first time round, starting the years first but I still have the same problem; Could it be my translation messing about with the ',' and '/'s?

Also rhyno, I did try what you said before methyl posted an answer;

I swapped the date to the first part of the file, and then used the delimiter as the / to skip apart however I thought it would but no luck.

So the problem I still have is that the -k only does one part of sorting.
So in this example it has only sorted the last part of testData.csv

Yeah, I was working on the same problem (a couple of weeks back now), but it's due in next week so you're probably going to get a lot of traffic soon :P

This particular issue is probably the most difficult aspect of it, too, which is why I was keen not to just give him the answer.

You're not to know, though, and the support on this forum helped me tremendously.

Again; to clarify, I am not looking for an answer, but rather why my solution isn't working.

Post your new sort code, might as well have a crack it now you have the answer anyway :P

I originally did this:

Code:

sort -n -k 2.9 -k 2.5 -k 2 testData.csv

Which is similar to methyl's solution which works off the year first, but the problem I get is it will only sort one part, not all of them.

The original problem persists.

Without seeing the command which went wrong or the matching data or the result ... here is my guess.
If you started with say:

Code:

sort -n -t","  -k3.7 -k3.4 -k3.1 testData.csv

Within the date field dd/mm/yyyy :
k3.7 matches yyyy ... okay so far.
k3.4 matches mm/yyyy ... its going wrong
k3.1 matches dd/mm/yyyy ... its gone very wrong
Thus the file actually gets sorted to dd/mm/yyyy order and the first two sort keys become irrelevant. The problem was overlapping sort keys. The fact that you did not specify a numeric sort was actually irrelevant in this circumstance because the order of a character sort would be the same.


(Though our posts crossed, the problem looks the same to me. We need to show where the key stops as well as where it starts if we do not have a suitable delimiter).