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Full Discussion: Need to sort text keeping first line always first
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Need to sort text keeping first line always first Post 302890891 by lsatenstein on Saturday 1st of March 2014 07:23:21 PM
Old 03-01-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Cragun
Try just having your first line in your input file have a <space> as the 1st character on the line and sort with the command:
Code:
sort -t '|'

Specifying a non-space field separator should make the leading space significant.

If you don't want a visible space at the start of the first line, make the first two characters in the file be a <space> character followed a <backspace> character.
Thanks for the reminder. I actually had " \bHost = xxx, topdir=ddd etc"

but without the -t the sort interprets the line, so that it saves it as Host=xxx ....

In 20 minutes, I will do the test as you suggested. The only change I have to do is test the sort parameters.

---------- Post updated at 07:23 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:08 PM ----------

This is the top part of my file. Notice the !!^HHost= (^H=Backspace)

Code:
1to8.txt                         |20140223 0056|25d55ad283aa400af464c76d713c07ad|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23/md5-c
alpha.txt                        |20140223 0056|83e065ac9ed97eca51391c20e9671373|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23/md5-c
a.txt                            |20140223 0056|933222b19ff3e7ea5f65517ea1f7d57e|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23/md5-c
crc32.c                          |20140223 0056|4d7a5dbb246898ff9d3ba19c0ded7f5b|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
crc32.h                          |20140223 0056|c15674694592358889120712db73be69|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
crc32.o                          |20140301 1912|10a49aede5f82d00205c1f89a8931731|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
DATE1                            |20140223 0056|e0167034133516d3ad5d61a09bae8156|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
DATE2                            |20140223 0056|e606fe0237c786174d2087090f81644a|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
daycalc.c                        |20140223 0056|1dd882b48e5c156748aba7fb38dbba51|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
dirdepth                         |20140301 1912|9f2ff1bd8b133ca0de8d124ad7d761d2|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
dirdepth.c                       |20140223 0056|a7c3f1c02245aec9a1b651e11018ff82|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
dirent.h                         |20140223 0056|1906fd554bf036fdf6ffd0b054ca321d|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
empty.txt                        |20140223 0056|d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23/md5-c
gcc.txt                          |20140223 0056|b8917c1a087abbf74f0294dad9cbf698|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
!! Host=Fedora20.Bachelor           |          |                       scan from| ^H/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
inih_r27.tar                     |20140223 0056|a8da6db331c8fe638cbb8c6940ce303e|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
inih_r28Dec16.00.tar             |20140223 0056|6fe6356f0ba2e501c2713958f119d493|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
itcrftn.c                        |20140223 0056|b1f1444cfdc35b6427ad3b002a176e9f|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
log.txt                          |20140223 0056|187c3fdbde0febf71257f0c0da9e21e7|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23/md5-c
makefile                         |20140223 0056|26955e927da56d1343af738a247b87e1|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23/md5-c
makefile                         |20140301 1912|02c8266eb8c3d3b52eabb30378ef9895|/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23
md5

Is the sort program too smart. I used '!' to collate low so that my title line stayed first. I tried it with ' ' when piped to the sort as ... | sort -t '|' > x
Last edited by Scrutinizer; 03-01-2014 at 09:23 PM.. Reason: quote tags to code tags
 

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