UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi ,

I have around 1000000 odd lines in a file in random order.

The file looks like this:

Code:

>string102
>string10437183
>string514
>string10435771
>string10437259
>string1049931
>string1342

I want to arrange it in increasing order:

Code:

>string102
>string514
>string1342
>string1049931
>string10435771
>string10437183
>string10437259

How can I arrange it in increasing order using grep??

Moderator's Comments:

edit by bakunin: When we ask to use CODE-tags we really mean it. They aren't optional. These were added as a gift by me, but the next time you should bring your own ones to the party. Thanks.

Not at all, because "grep" is a filtering tool: you can filter out lines which contain certain patterns with it, but not reorder lines.

I suggest you read the man page of "sort", which will do what you want. The construction of the appropiate key is left to the interested reader, just so much: let the sort key begin at the n+1-th character of the line where N is the number of characters in ">string", so that the sort key only consists of the random number. Then sort simply numerically.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

will the string be a fixed size or variable

Code:

sort -nk1.8,1.20 filename