Reputation: 64074

How to sort a tab delimited file with sort command?

I have a data with the following format:

foo<tab>1.00<space>1.33<space>2.00<tab>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?

Upvotes: 222

Answers (12)

guest_seq

Reputation: 1

Use sed to replace all spaces by e.g. underscore or any other character that is not contained in the file elsewhere. then sort, then sed back underscore into spaces:

sed 's/ /_/g' input | sort -k3nr | sed 's/_/ /g' > output

Upvotes: 0

Jason

Reputation: 21

sort -t "$(printf '\t')" works for me

Upvotes: 2

mightyandweakcoder

Reputation: 844

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.

Upvotes: 0

The Unfun Cat

Reputation: 32028

If you want to make it easier for yourself by only having tabs, replace the spaces with tabs:

tr " " "\t" < <file> | sort <options>

Upvotes: 0

Brian Carlsen

Reputation: 99

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.

Upvotes: 9

Danny

Reputation: 41

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.

Upvotes: 3

Lawrence Noronha

Reputation: 49

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:\>cat foo.bat

sort -k3 -t"    " tabfile.txt

Upvotes: 3

Lars Haugseth

Reputation: 14881

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.

Upvotes: 386

Lloyd

Reputation: 41

The $ solution didn't work for me. However, By actually putting the tab character itself in the command did: sort -t'' -k2

Upvotes: 4

James Thompson

Reputation: 48222

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  { $_->[1] }
    sort { $a->[0] <=> $b->[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";

Upvotes: 1