On 11/13/18 8:32 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
I have a bunch of files numbered from 1-over 2000 without leading zeros
(think rfc's)...
They have names with a non-numeric prefix & suffix around the number.
It would be nice if sort had the option to ignore non-numeric
data and only sort on the numeric data in the 'lines'/'files'.
Yeah, I can renumber and rename them all, but I just wanted
an instant command that could sort numeric values even if embedded
in a line, where the "field" was determined by the start/stop of
numeric characters.
Or is there an options for this already, and my manpage out of date?
Without ACTUAL data to experiment with, it's much harder for anyone else
to propose a solution that will work with your specific data.
But one quick approach comes to mind: decorate-sort-undecorate:
sed 's/^\([^0-9]*\)\([0-9]*\)/\2 \1\2/' < myinput \
| sort -k1,1n | sed 's/^[0-9]* //' > myoutput
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
