Shell Programming and Scripting

Operating System is SunOS.

Couldnt get the sort version

Code:

sort: illegal option -- version

If maintaining the original order of lines is really important for lines with matching 2nd fields, this should work for you:

Code:

nl -ba -fa -ha -p -s"|" input|sort -t"|" -k3,3 -k1,1n|cut -d"|" -f2-

Note that your desired output is missing the following line from the input file:

Exactly. Basically, you prepend every line with a line number, then sort - which will again result in first sorting along the sort key, then sorting by beginning of line as a secondary key - and as a final step removing the line number again.

<snipped> some apparent nonsense example i credit to not being fully awake at all.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

You lost me. You have mismatched single quotes on your sed statement.

I'm assuming you meant

Code:

sed 's/^/=|/' sampleinput.dat | sort -t "|" -k 3.1,3.6 | cut -d'|' -f2-

There is an "=" command in sed, but it is not a flag that can be used on an "s" command and it is not a special character in the replacement string on a substitution on the versions of the sed utility that I use.

Even if you were able to join the output of the = command and a "|" onto the start of a line, you'd still need the second -k option to sort because you need an n flag for that field. If you sort on line numbers without the -n flag, the input:
would sort to
Note that the second sort key and (with an n flag) wasn't needed (even though I used it) when using nl because the default line numbering format it uses is a right justified six digit field with leading <space> fill (which will sort correctly both as a string and as a numeric field). The sed = command, however, produces a variable width field with no leading spaces and no leading zeros to make all line numbers occupy the same number of columns.

True - my bad. Somehow the superfluous single quote slipped in upon copying from my terminal to the edit window.

Even more true - somehow several lines from my terminal got intermingled without me noticing that and, even worse, confusing even my thoughts. I apologize for answering threads before having had the first coffee of the day. (i do hope this being the case - getting senile, after all, is an even bleaker prospect.)

bakunin