Sorting a tab delimited file

Question

I have a data with the following format   foo lt tab gt 1 00 lt space gt 1 33 lt space gt 2 00 lt tab gt 3   Now I tried to sort the file based on the last field decreasingly  I tried the following commands but it wasn t sorted as we expected     sort -k3nr file txt    apparently this sort by space as delimiter    sort -t  t  -k3nr file txt   sort  multi-character tab    t     sort -t    bin echo   t    -k3 3nr file txt   sort  multi-character tab    t    What s the right way to do it   Here is the sample data

User · Answer

By default the field delimiter is non-blank to blank transition so tab should work just fine.

However, the columns are indexed base 1 and base 0 so you probably want

sort -k4nr file.txt

to sort file.txt by column 4 numerically in reverse order. (Though the data in the question has even 5 fields so the last field would be index 5.)

User · Answer

In general keeping data like this is not a great thing to do if you can avoid it  because people are always confusing tabs and spaces    Solving your problem is very straightforward in a scripting language like Perl  Python or Ruby  Here s some example code      usr bin perl -w  use strict   my  sort field   2  my  split regex   qr  s     my  data  push  data   7 8 t 9   push  data   4 5 t 6   push  data   1 2 t 3    my  sorted data        map      - gt  1        sort    a- gt  0   lt   gt   b- gt  0        map        split  split regex        sort field               data   print  unsorted n   print join   n    data    n   print  sorted by  sort field  lines split by  split regex n   print join   n    sorted data    n

User · Answer

Lars Haugseth answer only worked from the command line for me where it gives this error if executed from a shell script   sort  multi-character tab      t     The solution if it s coded in a shell script if anyone s looking is  sort -t         the tab character is in between the quote

User · Answer

Using bash  this will do the trick     sort -t   t  -k3 -nr file txt   Notice the dollar sign in front of the single-quoted string  You can read about it in the ANSI-C Quoting sections of the bash man page

User · Answer

I wanted a solution for Gnu sort on Windows  but none of the above solutions worked for me on the command line    Using Lloyd s clue  the following batch file   bat  worked for me   Type the tab character within the double quotes   C   gt cat foo bat  sort -k3 -t       tabfile txt

User · Answer

I was having this problem with sort in cygwin in a bash shell when using  general-numeric-sort    If I specified -t   t  -kFg  where F is the field number  it didn t work  but when I specified both -t   t  and -kF Fg  e g -k7 7g for the 7th field  it did work  -kF Fg without the -t   t  did not work

User · Answer

pipe it through something like awk    print print  1  t  2  t  3  t  4  t  5      This will change the spaces to tabs

User · Answer

The   solution didn t work for me  However  By actually putting the tab character itself in the command did  sort -t   -k2

User · Answer

You need to put an actual tab character after the -t    and to do that in a shell you hit ctrl-v and then the tab character   Most shells I ve used support this mode of literal tab entry      Beware  though  because copying and pasting from another place generally does not preserve tabs

User · Answer

If you want to make it easier for yourself by only having tabs  replace the spaces with tabs   tr       t   lt   lt file gt    sort  lt options gt

[linux] Sorting a tab delimited file

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