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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[linux] Sorting a tab delimited file

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