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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 302890899 by Don Cragun on Sunday 2nd of March 2014 03:35:29 AM
Old 03-02-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by lsatenstein
I ran sort as you indicated and it worked.
I'm glad that it worked for you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lsatenstein
I have tried to understand why you used -k4
In the input sample you provided the header line was:
Code:
!! Host=Fedora20.Bachelor | | scan from| ^H/home/leslie/Development/scandirFeb23

What I was saying was that the <space><backspace> (marked in red above) doesn't make any difference unless you're sorting on the 4th field instead of the 1st field. I didn't understand why those characters were present in your sample input.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lsatenstein
I was trying to sort by the first column. And for all that I tried,
the Host=Fedora .... was placed somewhere in the middle of the output file.

If I sorted on fields 2,3,4, the sort yields what I require.

If I did not specify a "-b" with the sort, it should assume the leading blanks are part of the field and should not be skipped over
.

Thank for your patience and help.
Yes. You are correct. If sort on your system behaved as specified by the standards, the -t option should not be needed in this case. I suggested using the -t option because of disedorgue's comment in message #4 in this thread:
Quote:
There was some version of "gnu sort" with a bug of '-b' option was enabled by default.
Since there is an interaction between the -b and -t options (although it isn't as clearly specified in the Linux sort(1) man page as it is in the POSIX sort utility man page), I thought that if your version of sort did have this bug, using the -t option might provide a work around.
 

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