Unix sort to sort only one column

Question

I have a tab delimited row , I want to sort the lines only with respect to the first column.

can this be achieved using Unix sort?

u.s 2||`` U.S ''||527 || 107
u.s.    2||`` U.S. ''||532 || 107
us. 2||Us.||532 || 112
u.s.    2||U.s.||629 || 112
us. 2||US.||6444 || 112
us  2||US||8655700 || 27
u.s 2||U.s||992 || 112

It has to sort using

u.s
u.s.
us. 
u.s.
us. 
us  
u.s

Dots are not being considered by the sort. The above one is sorted after the use of sort -k1. u.s. and u.s. are not together.

I am not sure what a tab delimited row means. Can you please give just an example? — Manoj R
– Manoj R, Commented Nov 25, 2010 at 5:15

Dennis Williamson · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-25 07:41:35Z

3

If you're sorting by the first field, there's no reason to specify the key unless you want to ignore the rest of the line. If you want to do that you need to do -k1,1. You will need to specify the C locale (or you can use the synonymous POSIX locale to not ignore the periods.

LC_COLLATE=C sort -k1,1 inputfile

or

LC_COLLATE=C sort inputfile

answered Nov 25, 2010 at 7:41

Dennis Williamson

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dennycrane · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-25 05:16:35Z

1

My sort (on Linux) can do it. I don't know how portable it is. In BASH:

sort -k1 -t$'\t'

-k1 gives the id of the key column(s), -t specifies the field separator.

answered Nov 25, 2010 at 5:16

dennycrane

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1 Comment

AlgoMan Over a year ago

dots and spaces are not taken care of, sort treats as though there is no dots at all.

Jonathan Leffler · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-25 07:11:39Z

1

You probably need to set the locale for the sort, and set it to the C locale:

LANG=C sort -k1 data.file

answered Nov 25, 2010 at 7:11

Jonathan Leffler

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martineno · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-25 05:16:10Z

0

I believe you are looking for:

sort -k 1 filetosort

Tab is a whitespace separator, which is the default separator for sort.

answered Nov 25, 2010 at 5:16

martineno

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