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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
Old 10-03-2005
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.
 

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JOIN(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   JOIN(1)

NAME
join - relational database operator SYNOPSIS
join [ options ] file1 file2 DESCRIPTION
Join forms, on the standard output, a join of the two relations specified by the lines of file1 and file2. If file1 is `-', the standard input is used. File1 and file2 must be sorted in increasing ASCII collating sequence on the fields on which they are to be joined, normally the first in each line. There is one line in the output for each pair of lines in file1 and file2 that have identical join fields. The output line normally con- sists of the common field, then the rest of the line from file1, then the rest of the line from file2. Fields are normally separated by blank, tab or newline. In this case, multiple separators count as one, and leading separators are dis- carded. These options are recognized: -an In addition to the normal output, produce a line for each unpairable line in file n, where n is 1 or 2. -e s Replace empty output fields by string s. -jn m Join on the mth field of file n. If n is missing, use the mth field in each file. -o list Each output line comprises the fields specified in list, each element of which has the form n.m, where n is a file number and m is a field number. -tc Use character c as a separator (tab character). Every appearance of c in a line is significant. SEE ALSO
sort(1), comm(1), awk(1) BUGS
With default field separation, the collating sequence is that of sort -b; with -t, the sequence is that of a plain sort. The conventions of join, sort, comm, uniq, look and awk(1) are wildly incongruous. 7th Edition April 29, 1985 JOIN(1)
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