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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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vdltodmx(1)						      General Commands Manual						       vdltodmx(1)

NAME
vdltodmx - dmx configuration file parser and printer SYNOPSIS
vdltodmx infile outfile DESCRIPTION
vdltodmx reads the input file, which should be in VDL configuration file format. After a successful parse, a file in Xdmx configuration file format is written to the output file. The VDL file format is used with xmovie, which is available from http://www.llnl.gov/icc/lc/img/xmovie/xmovie.html EXAMPLE
Given the following VDL-format file: 0 2 2560 2048 Left two-thirds [restrict=*:2] 2 :2.1 1280 2048 0 0 0 0 :2.2 1280 2048 1280 0 0 0 4 1280 1024 0 0 1280 1024 0 1024 1280 1024 1280 0 1280 1024 1280 1024 2560 2048 Right two-thirds [restrict=*:2] 2 :2.2 1280 2048 0 0 0 0 :2.3 1280 2048 1280 0 0 0 4 1280 1024 1280 0 1280 1024 1280 1024 1280 1024 2560 0 1280 1024 2560 1024 the following DMX-format file will be produced: virtual "Left two-thirds" 2560x2048 { display :2.1 1280x2048; display :2.2 1280x2048 @1280x0; } virtual "Right two-thirds" 2560x2048 { display :2.2 1280x2048; display :2.3 1280x2048 @1280x0; } BUGS
If the VDL file is not in the expected format, the program will probably dump core. SEE ALSO
Xdmx(1), xdmxconfig(1), vdl(3), xmovie(1) XFree86 Version 4.7.0 vdltodmx(1)
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