Hi ncwxpanther,
Instead of moving all of your data files to a parent directory, I would just have executed the script in the child directory where the files were located. But, either way should work.

Your data format seems to change every time you post something. As stated in my last post, my code was designed to work with the sample input you provided in post #27 under the title: "Entire Input for a single value (sorted by data)". Note that in that sample data there are no leading spaces, and the field separator between fields is a single tab character; not sequences of one or more spaces.

In the data shown above, however, there is a leading space character and the field separators are sequences of two, four, or six space characters. If there were no tab characters in your input this time, my script would have only seen one input field; not three. Please make the following changes to the script I suggested:
Change lines 2-4 from:

Code:

sort -n -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 "$@" | awk '
# Set input and output field separators to <tab>.
BEGIN { FS = OFS = "\t"

to:

Code:

sort -bn -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 "$@" | awk '
# Set output field separator to <tab>.
BEGIN {	OFS = "\t"

and change line 51 from:

Code:

	d[++cnt] = $0

to:

Code:

	d[++cnt] = $1 OFS $2 OFS $3

and try again. This will normalize the output using a single tab as the output field separator no matter how many spaces and tabs appeared before the 1st field or between other fields in your input files. It does, however, still assume that your real field 1 and 2 input data is numeric (which might or might not work with some of your early sample data with uppercase alphabetic values in the 1st two fields). If the 1st two fields are alphanumeric instead of numeric, you could change line 2 in the script I suggested above to:

Code:

sort -b -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3n "$@" | awk '

As I said before, this code provides individual rankings for each different pair of field 1 and field 2 values in a single output file. If each of your 122 sample input files contains five different pairs of field 1 and 2 values and the same values appears in all of your input files, you will get five rank-ordered lists in the output sorted by the field 1 and 2 values with each list containing 122 entries. If 5 of your 122 input files contain an additional line with another pair of field 1 and 2 values, there will be another list in the output with only 5 entries. If you really need to limit the output to only contain field 1 and field 2 value combinations that appear in a specific file, I can add code to my script to make that happen. But, of course, I still find your continually changing descriptions of your desired output confusing and I may have completely misinterpreted what you are trying to do.

Hi Corona688,
With the data I was using field 1 never had any leading spaces and the field separator was always a single tab character, so:

Code:

sort -n -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 file...

worked with the data I was using. But, with the above sort command, leading spaces and tabs are part of the data being sorted. To ignore leading blanks, we also need the -b option to be specified before any of the -k sort key options.

Hopefully,

Code:

sort -bn -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 file...

or:

Code:

sort -b -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3n file...

will work better for you (depending on whether the 1st two fields are numeric or alphanumeric, respectively).

Note also that the standards say that if the -t char option is not specified, sort uses strings of one or more adjacent blanks (i.e., <space>s and <tab>s) as a field separator. But, if you include a -t option on the command line, each occurrence of char shall treated as a field separator. So, if an input line has a leading space and two spaces between the 2nd and 3rd "fields" (as recognized by awk with the default FS), sort would see field 1 as the empty string before the 1st space, field 2 as the 1st non-empty string, and field 3 would be the empty string between the next two spaces.

Are we having fun yet?