Hi All,

First time poster.

I have a text file that as many entries like below (single line):
egrep RspTime conlb.txt |more
S(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:5050:UP) Hits(13358983, 2/sec, P[12685309, 2/sec]) ATr(2) Mbps(0.07) BWlmt(0 kbits) RspTime(16.50 ms)
...
I am trying to sort on the RspTime from highest to lowest order. When I apply the following command I get a sort where the number start with 9:

suse10x:~ # egrep RspTime conlb.txt | awk '{print $10 $11 " " $1}' | sort -nr |more
RspTime(999.65ms) S(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:UP)
RspTime(99.95ms) S(yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy:80:UP)
...<snip>
RspTime(9371.11ms) S(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:UP)
RspTime(9345.20ms) S(yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy:80:UP)
RspTime(9319.48ms) S(yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy:80:UP)

There are response times that are much higher than 999.65.

How can I sort this to get the output I am looking for with the highest RspTime ?

That's because your command is not able to isolate the RspTime numbers from the non-numbers. Formulate your command so that you sort only on the numerical RspTime column instead of the alphanumeric data. Show a sample of the input data file also.

nawk -F'[( ]' '{print $(NF-1) "\t" $0}' conlb.txt  | sort -rn -k1,1 | cut -f2-

Hey vgersh99.

This is fantastic. One question though that i can not figure out. what is the "\t" doing special? If I replace it with a space " " I get the (NF-1) first in the print out but the "\t" is keeping it in the orginal location.

Thanks again!

"\t" (tab) is a default field separator for 'cut' that I use in the last piped command.