Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file containing data like so:

2012-01-02 GREEN 4
2012-01-02 GREEN 6
2012-01-02 GREEN 7
2012-01-02 BLUE 4
2012-01-02 BLUE 3
2012-01-02 GREEN 4
2012-01-02 RED 4
2012-01-02 RED 8
2012-01-02 GREEN 4
2012-01-02 YELLOW 5
2012-01-02 YELLOW 2

I can't always predict what the strings are going to be in the second column (so in the example above there are colours but the data file could contain any string in column two). There is always however a number in the third column (which I want the max value of for a paticular string in column two). Is awk able to:
or would this be easier with Perl (or even shell)? any code examples much appreciated!

Code:

$ sort -r -k2 -k3 input.txt | nawk '!a[$2]++'
2012-01-02 YELLOW 5
2012-01-02 RED 8
2012-01-02 GREEN 7
2012-01-02 BLUE 4

Another approach:

Code:

awk '{a[$1 FS $2]=a[$1 FS $2] > $3?a[$1 FS $2]:$3}END{for(i in a)print i, a[i]}' file

Related post to your query : https://www.unix.com/shell-programmin...st-number.html

Code:

perl -ane 'if($F[2] > $x{$F[1]}){$y{$F[1]}=$F[0]; $x{$F[1]}=$F[2]}; END{for(keys %x){print "$y{$_} $_ $x{$_}\n"}}' inputfile