CODEWITHSUNDEEP
awk
user1889034
user1889034

Reputation: 353

sort by field length with awk... not working

I have a tab-separated file I need to order by the length of the first field. I've found samples of a line that should do that for me, but it's giving very strange results:

awk -F\t '{print length($1) " " $0|"sort -rn"}' SpanishGlossary.utf8 | sed 's/^.[^>]*>/>/' > test.tmp

... gives this (several representative samples -- it's a very long file):

56 cafés especiales y orgánicos special and organic coffees
56 amplia experiencia gerencial broad managerial experience
55 una fundada confianza en que a well-founded confidence that
55 Servicios de Desarrollo Empresarial  Business Development Services
...
6 son estas are these
6 son entregadas a  are given to
6 son determinantes para    are crucial for
6 son autolimitativos   are self-limiting
...
0 tal grado de  such a degree of
0 tales such
0 tales propósitos  such purposes
0 tales principios  such principles
0 tales o cuales    this or that

That leading number should be the length of the first field, but it's obviously not. I don't know what that's counting.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 268

Answers (1)

Kent
Kent

Reputation: 195239

try this:

awk '$0=length($1) FS $0' file | sort -nr | sed -r 's/^\S*\s//'

test:

kent$  cat f
as foo
a foo
aaa foo
aaaaa foo
aaaa foo

kent$  awk '$0=length($1) FS $0' f|sort -nr|sed -r 's/^\S*\s//'
aaaaa foo
aaaa foo
aaa foo
as foo
a foo

here I used space(default) as awk's FS, if you need the tab, add -F'\t'

EDIT

add one awk (gnu awk) only one-liner for @Jaypal,

I mentioned gawk, because it has asort and asorti which we could use for sorting.

also I changed the input file to add some same length ($1) lines.

better "@val_num_asc" or desc in asorti(a,b,"...")

kent$  cat f
as foo
a foo
aaa foo
ccc foo
aaaaa foo
bbbbb foo
aaaa foo

kent$  awk '{a[length($1)"."NR]=$0}END{asorti(a,b);for(i=NR;i>0;i--)print a[b[i]]}' f
bbbbb foo
aaaaa foo
aaaa foo
ccc foo
aaa foo
as foo
a foo

Upvotes: 4

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