Misunderstanding of sort behavior Post: 85188

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Misunderstanding of sort behavior Post 85188 by chlorine on Monday 3rd of October 2005 11:05:03 AM

10-03-2005

Registered User

Misunderstanding of sort behavior

Hi everyone,

I use the sort from the 5.3.0 coreutils package. I have a file consisting in 5 fields
separated by a single space, with no leading or trailing blanks.
I want to sort it first according to the 4th field, which contains integers
(some of them negative), and secondly on the second field, which is a string
(i.e. if two lines have the same value for the 4th field I want them sorted according
to the second field).

After reading the man page and the info page I came up with
sort sort -k 4,4n -k 2,2 correspondance_tmp
(where correspondance_tmp is my file), but this seems not to work because
when I ask it to check if the result is sorted according to the 4th field it says
no. So I think I must not know how to specify the fields properly.

Here is a short extract from my working session:
$ sort -k 4,4n -k 2,2 correspondance_tmp > correspondance
$ sort -c -k4,4n correspondance
sort: correspondance:37: disorder: . 0-00.com 1 -1 43
$ cat correspondance | awk '{print $4}' | sort -cn
$

This last check of sortedness exists without error, which means the
corresponding file is correctly sorted.
The line about which sorts complains in file correspondance is in
a large group of lines all having -1 for 4th field, so it seems to be
correctly placed.
All my locales are set to "C".

If anyone has any advice I'd greatly appreciate.

chlorine

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LEARN ABOUT LINUX

wrap-and-sort

WRAP-AND-SORT(1)                                              General Commands Manual                                             WRAP-AND-SORT(1)

NAME

       wrap-and-sort - wrap long lines and sort items in Debian packaging files

SYNOPSIS

       wrap-and-sort [options]

DESCRIPTION

       wrap-and-sort  wraps the package lists in Debian control files. By default the lists will only split into multiple lines if the entries are
       longer than 80 characters. wrap-and-sort sorts the package lists in Debian control files and all .install files. Beside that  wrap-and-sort
       removes trailing spaces in these files.

       This  script should be run in the root of a Debian package tree. It searches for control, control.in, copyright, copyright.in, install, and
       *.install in the debian directory.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help
              Show this help message and exit.

       -a, --wrap-always
              Wrap all package lists in the Debian control file even if the entries are shorter than 80 characters and could fit in one line line.

       -s, --short-indent
              Only indent wrapped lines by one space (default is in-line with the field name).

       -b, --sort-binary-packages
              Sort binary package paragraphs by name.

       -k, --keep-first
              When sorting binary package paragraphs, leave the first one at the top.  Unqualified debhelper(7) configuration files are applied to
              the first package.

       -n, --no-cleanup
              Do not remove trailing whitespaces.

       -d path, --debian-directory=path
              Location of the debian directory (default: ./debian).

       -f file, --file=file
              Wrap  and sort only the specified file.  You can specify this parameter multiple times.  All supported files will be processed if no
              files are specified.

       -v, --verbose
              Print all files that are touched.

AUTHORS

       wrap-and-sort and this manpage have been written by Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>.

       Both are released under the ISC license.

DEBIAN                                                           Debian Utilities                                                 WRAP-AND-SORT(1)

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