Shell Programming and Scripting

Please post a data sample which contains commas as delimiters. As posted, the delimiter for the data field is a solidus and there are no comma-delimited fields.

I know exactly what assignment this is for so I won't give away too much.

When you're sorting, think about how you're splitting that sort... You're splitting it by the comma, yet you want to sort by date which has a forward-slash delimiting it.

Also, think about what order those details are being placed in birthday.csv it might make things simpler for you...

Code:

mike,0208,19/08/1991
nickle,0182,02/07/1960
...

Like that?

Thank you for hasty reply.

---------- Post updated at 12:15 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:06 PM ----------

As far as I am aware the / has nothing to do with it as I am using the -k wildcard which does it by position.
:/

As I said, I know this is an assignment, so if I just give you the answer, we'll both get into trouble and you won't learn anything. I can see you're actually trying (unlike most of our peers), but the fact remains that this is an assignment meant to test our abilities.

Look at what sort has to offer. -n offers a numerical sort (great for dates which have been chopped up...)

As I said previously to you, this is a huge hint now, make things easier for yourself and THINK about the order of your .csv file. Who said those details had to go in that order you've specified...

Yes, you will still need -k, too. But think about what it does.


That's all I'm offering. :P

You were pretty close. In the comma-separated file the date is indeed field number 3.


However to sort to date order we need to sort to Year-Month-Day order (not Day-Month-Year order). Because we don't have a consistent delimiter we are reduced to specifying character positions within field 3.

Code:

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

There may be much more to do depending on how you want to deal with duplicate dates. Think about the order of fields 1 and 2 in that situation.

This is also an exercise in data file design. You can make life so much easier by storing dates in an easy-to-sort and easy-to-match format.

Or, you know, one of the mods just gifts you the answer

Lucky boy.