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sorting numbers with sort -n

 
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# 1  
Old 07-21-2010
sorting numbers with sort -n
Looking for help for sort, I learned that for sorting numbers I use:
sort -n
but it seems that that is not enough when you have numbers like 0.2000E+7 for example, sort -n will not worry about the E+7 part, and will just sort the numbers like 0.2000.

Exapmle:

Code:
 cat example.txt
.91000E+07
.92000E+04
.93000E+06
.94000E+02
.95000E+09
.96000E+07

sort -n example.txt
.91000E+07
.92000E+04
.93000E+06
.94000E+02
.95000E+09
.96000E+07

How can I fix that?Smilie
# 2  
Old 07-21-2010
one way:

Code:
#  awk '{printf("%f\n",$1)}' example.txt | sort -n
94.000000
9200.000000
930000.000000
9100000.000000
9600000.000000
950000000.000000

HTH
This User Gave Thanks to Tytalus For This Post:
cosmologist
# 3  
Old 07-21-2010
Is that the only way to do it?
# 4  
Old 07-21-2010
What is not ok with this solution? Afaik sort can't handle exponential values in this syntax.
# 5  
Old 07-21-2010
What is I have a bigger file with more columns? Let's say I want to sort by the second column and out put the whole sorted file... I tried:

Code:
awk '{printf($1, "%f\n",$2, $3, $4, $5)}' file.txt | sort -n -k 2.1 > sortfile.txt

but it damaged the file... I don't even know how to exmplain the output...
# 6  
Old 07-21-2010
This seems to work:

Code:
sort -t+ -nk2 file

(at least for values > 0)
This User Gave Thanks to Scott For This Post:
cosmologist
# 7  
Old 07-21-2010
Quote:
Originally Posted by scottn
This seems to work:

Code:
sort -t+ -nk2 file

(at least for values > 0)

Yes, that worked ... for a different column I use

Code:
sort -t+ -nk2 -k 2 file

for example and it works! Thanks!
 
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