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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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SORT(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   SORT(1)

NAME
sort - sort a file of ASCII lines SYNOPSIS
sort [-bcdfimnru] [-tc] [-o name] [+pos1] [-pos2] file ... OPTIONS
-b Skip leading blanks when making comparisons -c Check to see if a file is sorted -d Dictionary order: ignore punctuation -f Fold upper case onto lower case -i Ignore nonASCII characters -m Merge presorted files -n Numeric sort order -o Next argument is output file -r Reverse the sort order -t Following character is field separator -u Unique mode (delete duplicate lines) EXAMPLES
sort -nr file # Sort keys numerically, reversed sort +2 -4 file # Sort using fields 2 and 3 as key sort +2 -t: -o out # Field separator is : sort +.3 -.6 # Characters 3 through 5 form the key DESCRIPTION
Sort sorts one or more files. If no files are specified, stdin is sorted. Output is written on standard output, unless -o is specified. The options +pos1 -pos2 use only fields pos1 up to but not including pos2 as the sort key, where a field is a string of characters delim- ited by spaces and tabs, unless a different field delimiter is specified with -t. Both pos1 and pos2 have the form m.n where m tells the number of fields and n tells the number of characters. Either m or n may be omitted. SEE ALSO
comm(1), grep(1), uniq(1). SORT(1)
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