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Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Difference of Sort -n -k2 -k3 & Sort -n -k2,3 Post 302989920 by Don Cragun on Thursday 19th of January 2017 08:38:18 PM
Old 01-19-2017
According to the standards, the command:
Code:
sort -n -k2 -k3 file

sorts lines in file into increasing order evaluating field 2 and all fields following it as numeric values and if fields 2 to the end of the line compare equal to another line it then compares field 3 and all fields following it as numeric values and if two lines still compare as equal it then compares the entire line as a string of bytes to determine which line will come first.
Code:
sort -n -k2,3 file

sorts lines in file into increasing order evaluating the 2nd and 3rd fields as numeric values and if the numeric values of those two fields are the same when comparing two lines the entire line will be compared as a string of bytes to determine which line will come first.

If what you are trying to do is sort numeric values in fields 2 and 3 in file and only keep one line in cases when there are multiple lines with identical numeric values in those two fields, you would want to use:
Code:
sort -u -n -k2,3 file

if field 2 is your primary sort key and field 3 is your secondary key or:
Code:
sort -u -n -k3,3 -k2,2 file

if field 3 is your primary sort key and field 2 is your secondary key.
This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun 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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