Shell Programming and Scripting

Let's think methodically what we want to do here:

I'm assuming I have this data in the csv in this order:

11/12/2001,1234,Paul Stephens

So, I want to sort by number

Code:

sort -n

then I want split that date, thankfully the date has a nice delimiter to use:

Code:

sort -n  -t"/"

So now I can sort the date easily, but as this date is dd/mm/yyyy I need to reverse it to make the sort work properly:

Code:

sort -n  -t"/" -k3 -k2 -k1 testData.csv

You might want to use a function that -o(utputs) to a file...

sort -t',' -k3.7n,3.10n -k3.4n,3.5n -k3.1n,3.2n testData.csv

Yea I understand, and that's why yours specifies the exact locations:
Yet, it still fails... :'( ... It's really getting on my nerves, but I appreciate your constant support.

---------- Post updated at 01:05 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:03 PM ----------

In my above post I said I tried that; but it still failed; which is why I am convinced there is something wrong with my client and the ,'s and the /'s .

I am not looking for an answer, I already had one, but something's going wrong. I just can't see it.


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EDIT:

Tried various variations of code:

And with this for example:

Code:

sort -t',' -k3.7n,3.10n -k3.4n,3.5n -k3.1n,3.2n birthday.csv

Minas,284729,14/05/1956
Bono,92374,08/07/1970
Glads,02883,07/01/1987
Mario,09281,02/17/1987
Boomer,0182,18/11/1988
Jesus,01322,17/03/1991

That's the output: As you can see sorted in third column, not others :'(

Code:

sort -t',' -k3.7n,3.10n -k3.4n,3.5n -k3.1n,3.2n birthday.csv

Minas,284729,14/05/1956
Bono,92374,08/07/1970
Glads,02883,07/01/1987
Mario,09281,02/17/1987
Boomer,0182,18/11/1988
Jesus,01322,17/03/1991

Imho. I can't see anything wrong with this output. Assuming the test data is meant to be dd/mm/yyyy (despite month "17" in the middle column!), the data is in the correct sorted order - ascending yyyy/mm/dd.
Try a bigger data file with a decent variation of dates (I did). Your test data only has one case where the dates are in different years.

Ok Methyl, thank you for your help; that last post was most helpful as you actually pointed out to me that I was looking at it all wrong; stupid of me, but I was somehow expecting it to sort by date, and then move all the months in order and dates, which is impossible without altering. So thanks for pointing it out, one of the first sets of code I used worked, so thanks for pointing out something staring in my face.