Alphanumeric sorting of a string with variable width size

Question

I am stuck in a small sorting step. I have a huge file with >300K entries and the file has to be sorted on a specific column containing alphanumeric identifiers as

Rpl12-8
Lrsam1-1
Rpl12-9
Lrsam1-2
Rpl12-10
Lrsam1-5
Rpl12-11
Lrsam1-101
Lrsam2-1
Act-1
Act-100
Act-101
Act-11

The problem is the variable width size, so I am unable to specify the second key identifier (sort -k 1.8n).The first sort is on first alphabet, then on number next to it and then the third number after "-". Can I specifically enable sorting after "-" using delimiter field so then I don't care about width of string.

Desired output would be :

Act-1
Act-11
Act-100
Act-101
Lrsam1-1
Lrsam1-2
Lrsam1-5
Lrsam1-101
Lrsam2-1
Rpl12-8
Rpl12-9
Rpl12-10
Rpl12-11

Josh Jolly · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-20 14:47:21Z

2

With the above data in input.txt:

sort -t- -k1,1 -k2n input.txt

You can change the field delimiter to - with -t, then sort on the first field only (as a string) with -k1,1, and finally the 2nd field (as a number) with -k2n.

answered Mar 20, 2014 at 14:47

Josh Jolly

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2 Comments

Sukhi Over a year ago

Thanks for the answer, it works great. What if the file is tab separated and above shown example is 5th column. Can I specify two identifiers in same line such as the file is tab seperated but used "-" delimiter for 5th column or I might have to use in conjugation with awk etc.

Josh Jolly Over a year ago

My answer would only work for that column by itself, if it is a single column in a tab-separated file, then you will have to use another tool as well. For example you could replace the hyphens with a tab, then sort on both columns, then replace that tab with a hyphen again. How many columns are there in total? What data do the other columns contain?

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