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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers New to Unix command line and have a question about the "sort" command Post 302576981 by budfoxcat on Sunday 27th of November 2011 11:06:25 PM
Old 11-28-2011
New to Unix command line and have a question about the "sort" command

I am going through the Unix Made Easy second edition book by John Muster. So far it's been very informative and I can tell it may be a bit out of date.

In one of the exercises it talks about the "sort" command and using it to sort column's of data etc. The "sort" command has changed a bit and it looks like the options using +0 OR +1 to sort by columns 1 and 2 are no longer used. These are replaced with the -k option.

I understand I can sort the first column of data in a file by using a command like "sort -k1 filename".

My question is how can I add in secondary and third columns to sort by to refine the information more? This is would be useful where you have letters or numbers that are the same and you want to add more criteria from other columns to sort the data.

In the book it talks about this and uses commands like "sort +2 -3 +1 -2 filename". How does this use work using -k because I have been unable to sort the data with the secondary options.
 

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MREAD(1)						      General Commands Manual							  MREAD(1)

NAME
mread - low level read (copy) an MSDOS file to Unix SYNOPSIS
mread [ -tnm ] msdosfile unixfile mread [ -tnm ] msdosfile [ msdosfiles... ] unixdirectory DESCRIPTION
In the first form, mread copies the specified MSDOS file to the named Unix file. The second form of the command copies multiple MSDOS files to the named Unix directory. Mread will allow the following command line options: t Text file transfer. Mread will translate incoming carriage return/line feeds to line feeds. n No warning. Mread will not warn the user when overwriting an existing file. m Preserve the file modification times. If the target file already exists, and the -n option is not in effect, mread asks whether or not to overwrite the file. MSDOS subdirectory names are supported with either the '/' or '' separator. The use of the '' separator or wildcards will require the names to be enclosed in quotes to protect them from the shell. The mcd command may be used to establish the device and the current working directory (relative to MSDOS), otherwise the default is A:/. SEE ALSO
mcd(1), mcopy(1), mtype(1), mwrite(1) BUGS
Unlike MSDOS, the destination directory may not be omitted. local MREAD(1)
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