Shell Programming and Scripting

my sample is
01012007
01022007
02022007
01032007
20022007
02032007
01092007
05022007
30022007

which is date in ddmmccyy format
i try to sort
like this
sort -n +0.2 -0.5 +0.0 -0.3 file

but the results are not correct

pls help......

sort works with fields. It can't know by this input where a field begins and where it ends because there is no field separator. Because of this many dates are written in format

Code:

yyyymmdd

which is easy to sort.
Either way, I think you got to reformat your date in some way before working with sort, depending on how you want to use it.

Here an example:

Code:

awk '{print substr($1,5,4) substr($1,3,2) substr($1,1,2) }' infile| sort -n

If you need the old format, you see the substr functions above and just read up about them in some awk manual and reformat your now sorted date back.

using POSIX notation (which starts at 1, not 0 and ranges are inclusive) this appears to work

Code:

sort -n -k 1.3,1.4 -k 1.1,1.2 testfile

I've only tested using GNU sort
sort --version
sort (GNU coreutils) 6.12

Right works Forget my cumbersome suggestion. To complete it

Code:

sort -n -k 1.5,1.8 -k 1.3,1.4 -k 1.1,1.2 infile

for the case the year changes too.