CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellsorting
Sahil
Sahil

Reputation: 9496

Sort command not working as expected?

I have got a dataset like this

[email protected],2009-11-27
[email protected],2009-11-27
[email protected],2009-11-27

When I am running command to delete all of the same entries of column2 

sort -t ',' -k2 stars.txt -u

It is deleting the entry of column1, and in order to delete the duplicate entries of column2, I am having to enter -k3 flag 

sort -t ',' -k3 stars.txt -u

Can anyone explain to me why it is happening? Why I have to enter +1 to the column in the file to delete the column?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 585

Answers (2)

Kent
Kent

Reputation: 195229

this is typical awk job, no sorting needed. I add one short line here, in case you want to give it a try.

awk -F, '!a[$2]++' file

will do the job.

Upvotes: 1

Igor Chubin
Igor Chubin

Reputation: 64613

In my system all works correctly:

$ sort -t, -k1 -u 1.txt 
[email protected],2009-11-27
[email protected],2009-11-27

$ sort -t, -k2 -u 1.txt 
[email protected],2009-11-27

It may be due to your locale. Can you please repleat the command but with LANG=C?

$ LANG=C sort -t, -k1 -u 1.txt 
$ LANG=C sort -t, -k2 -u 1.txt

Upvotes: 2

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