Sorting and filtering in Bash

Question

I have a file in the following format:

somePlane (1,2,3) (1,0,0) (0,0,1) R
awsomePlane (1,0,0) (0,1,0) (0,0,1) B
nicePlane (1,1,1) (2,4,7) (7,1,0) G

I'm trying to sort it [alphabetically according to the first column] and put it into an array while each line is an array element.

But I don't even manage to sort it and have no idea how to put each row into an array element.

I tried the following to sort but it didn't work:

sort -t" " -k1 myfile.txt

What can I do to sort it and insert it into array?

[EDIT] I had a mistake and it seems I was able to sort it, but I still don't know how to insert each line into an array. I used the following command to sort:

sort -t" " -f -k1 myfile.txt 

Answer 1

If you're using Bash 4.0 or newer, the best way is to use readarray (synonym for mapfile) with redirection and process substitution, as it doesn't need loops and doesn't risk pathname expansions:

readarray -t ARRAY < <(exec sort -t" " -f -k1 myfile.txt)

Example output:

> for I in "${!ARRAY[@]}"; do echo "$I : ${ARRAY[I]}"; done
0 : awsomePlane (1,0,0) (0,1,0) (0,0,1) B
1 : nicePlane (1,1,1) (2,4,7) (7,1,0) G
2 : somePlane (1,2,3) (1,0,0) (0,0,1) R

Answer 2

You can sort and store the lines into an array as shown below:

# sort and create array
$ IFS=$'\n' arr=( $(sort file.txt) )

# access array elements
$ echo ${arr[0]}
awsomePlane (1,0,0) (0,1,0) (0,0,1) B    

$ echo ${arr[1]}
nicePlane (1,1,1) (2,4,7) (7,1,0) G    

$ echo ${arr[2]}
somePlane (1,2,3) (1,0,0) (0,0,1) R