CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
MUY Belgium
MUY Belgium

Reputation: 2452

How to order in bash, a space separated flat file?

If a have a flat file database in which fields are separated by space like this :

Name    Salary_cost function
Luc     50000       Engineer in mechanics
Gerard  35000       Bad in all, good at nothing
Martijn 150000      Director 
Robert  45000       Java Specialist
(...)

I would like to order this stuff by Salary_cost. I can order this using this kind of stuff

cat file.txt | sed-e 's/ \+/\t/g' | sort -k 2

But this is no good, because

I have thought of something like Recutils. But I cannot grasp how to use it for this purpose.

I can I sort this file by "Salary_cost" fields, considering other lines as records and the first as data header, using a command line interface (bash,sh, ksh,...)?

There is a lot of interfaces which produce such output, for example: df, transmission-remote, ps, ... Even coma separated files are close to this structure.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 200

Answers (1)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785691

You can use head, tail combination piped with sort:

fld="Salary_cost"

n=$(awk -v q="$fld" 'NR==1{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i==q) {print i; exit}}' file)

head -1 file && tail -n +2 file | sort -nk$n
Name    Salary_cost function
Gerard  35000       Bad in all, good at nothing
Robert  45000       Java Specialist
Luc     50000       Engineer in mechanics
Martijn 150000      Director

Upvotes: 1

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