ok so I have a list of names that end in either ot,om,oa.

So for example

DETOT
MANOA
DET0M
DET0A
MANOT
SEAOT

etc...

I want to be able to group this list by OT, OM, OA and have the output have some headers like this and be alphabatized and if possible be in colums instead of like below so three columns:

OT
-----
DETOT
MANOT
SEAOT

OA
----
DETOA
MAN0A

Thanks for any feedback!

Hi.

Assuming that the words can be any length, I think I would reverse the lines, sort them, then reverse them again just before printing. Check to see if you have command rev, then look at command sort ... cheers, drl

PS I think some zeros, "0", are mixed in with letter ohs, "O" in the sample data.

Thank you for the reply. Actually it will always be 5 charectors and it's all the letter O not zero's......

Is your scenerio still the best way? How do I column it out? i'm assuming some printf command but again I'm so new I'm not familiar on how to use it.

what about if I add a grep statement that greps out OT. Then I run it again to grep out OM and then again for OA....

How would I then go about printing each output into a column with a header?

Thanks!

Since you already know what groups you are expecting, you can probably skip the step of reversing the lines and just grep out the relevant bits thus:

#!/bin/sh
MYGROUPS="OT OM OA"
file_to_sort=$1
for group in $MYGROUPS
do
    echo "$group"
    echo "--"
    egrep "${group}\$" $file_to_sort | sort
    echo ""
done
# Catch any unexpected input (if you want that)
if egrep -v "`echo $MYGROUPS | sed 's/ /\|/g'`" $file_to_sort > /dev/null
then
    echo "*** UNEXPECTED ***"
    egrep -v "(`echo $MYGROUPS | sed 's/ /\|/g'`)" $file_to_sort
fi

Ok i'm really really new to this is there anyway you can break down your post?

This is what I understand.

is to echo each group and put a -- under it
then search for each group (OT OM OA) and I kinda get lost here ....

I'm so sorry that I need so much help!

by the way I did test it and it worked out perfect!!! Is there a way to make the outputs be side by side columns?
Also how can I change the headings of the groups? So I want to still group by OT OM OA but I want the headings of each to be something different?

Side by side is harder as you'd have to either make temporary files or store the lists in memory, then display it back out once you are ready.

Shell doesn't lend itself very well to formatting output, you'd have to monkey about with inserting a number of tab characters based on how long the various names in the file are.

Perl would probably be the language of choice for this as it's got a very nice function for generating reports etc called 'format'. You can design a form, then populate the data and dump it out via the 'write' command. It'd be a bit more complex than the previous shell script though as it would also need to store things in memory or in files rather than streaming everything.