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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Meaning of "b" modifier in "sort" command Post 302493349 by rbatte1 on Wednesday 2nd of February 2011 12:31:59 PM
Old 02-02-2011
You have the answer from the rather terse man page. Basically what you have without using -b is a problem where the sort command will consider each blank as a field separator, so for a line linke this:
Code:
123456789012345678901234567890    (Just column refernece numbers)
    1234   abcd    zyxw
    2345   bcde    yxwv
   34567   cdef    xwvu
   45678   defg    wvut

... then it will assume that abcd is actually field 9 and everything gets skewed off. On the third line, cdef is field 8 (the number is one digit longer and replaces one blank)

What is nice for a human to look at because it is in nice columns does not mean the same to the sort command.

Using the -b flag means it will ignore leading and multiple blanks, so you get 1234 as the first field, abcd as the second and zyxv as the third from the top line, which is probalby more what a human would naturally do.





Does that help?




Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK
This User Gave Thanks to rbatte1 For This Post:
 

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look(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   look(1)

NAME
look - Finds lines in a sorted list SYNOPSIS
look [-df] [-tcharacter] string [file] The look command prints all lines in a sorted file that begin with string. OPTIONS
Uses dictionary order; only letters, digits, tabs, and spaces are used in comparisons. Searches without regard to case; treats uppercase and lowercase as equivalent. Ignores character and characters following it in the search string. If you specify look -tC ABCDE, the string ABCDE would become (in effect) AB, with CDE being ignored. This option is primarily for shell scripts, in which more than one string is being processed. DESCRIPTION
If no file is specified, look searches in the system word list /usr/share/dict/words, with the options -df assumed by default. The look command uses binary search. The -d and -f options affect comparisons as in sort. NOTES
In order to use the -f option, you must first sort file with the sort -f command; otherwise, look displays only lowercase items. If you do not specify -f, but specify a file (such as /usr/share/dict/words) that has been sorted with sort -f, look may not produce any output. EXAMPLES
To search a sorted file called sortfile for all lines that begin with the string as, enter: look as sortfile To search the system word list for all words beginning with smi, enter: look smi This might result in: smile smirk smith smithereens Smithfield Smithson smithy smitten FILES
System word list. SEE ALSO
Commands: grep(1), sort(1), spell(1) look(1)
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