I want to sort my file by decreasing number of the second column, but not changing the place of the header. Currently it is like this in a csv file that has two columns like this:
Person Age
Sarah 15
Robert 23
Emma 31
Bob 9
I want it to be like this:
Person Age
Emma 31
Robert 23
Sarah 15
Bob 9
Please help a beginner in Unix.
Read http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/sort.1.html to learn about the sort command on UNIX/Linux. That's how I and everyone else learned.
$ sort --key 2 --reverse --numeric-sort myfile > mysortedfile
The only problem is that this sorts the line with "Person Age" as if it had the numeric value of zero, and moves it to the last line of the file. You then have to move that line after sorting the file.
To solve the "header in front" problem as outlined in Bills answer, you could use awk in addition to sort:
awk 'NR==1 {print ; next } { print | "sort -n -r -k2" }' yourfile > sorted_file
NR==1 applies only for the first line: it is printedsort command (you could do the sorting in awk itself, but that would be a bit longer )This will do the trick except remove blank lines:
sed -n '1 ! p' in.txt | sort --key 2 --reverse --numeric-sort | sed '1 i\Person\tAge' > out.txt
