Bash – sort by not first character

bashsorting

I want to sort my file by first column but I have to start sort from 5 character. How can I do that?

My file:

"TTTTCTTACA"            1       1
"TTTTCTTACC"                    1
"TTTTCTTACT"    1       1
"TTTTCTTAGC"    1
"TTTTCTTATT"                    2
"TTTTCTTCAA"    1               1       1
"TTTTCTTCAG"    1               2       1
"TTTTCTTCAT"            1       2       2
"TTTTCTTCCT"                            2
"TTTTCTTCGG"                    2       2
"TTTTCTTCTA"                            1
"TTTTCTTCTG"            1
"TTTTCTTCTT"    1                       2
"TTTTCTTGAA"            1
"TTTTCTTGCT"    1               1       1
"TTTTCTTTAA"    1
"TTTTCTTTAG"            1       1
"TTTTCTTTCT"    1
"TTTTCTTTGC"    1
"TTTTCTTTGG"            1       1
"TTTTCTTTGT"    1       1       2       1
"TTTTCTTTTA"    1

I was trying:

sort -k1,1 file | uniq -s 6 -w 5

Of course, it doesn't work. Mayby sort has some flags, but I didn't find them. Do you have some idea?

Best Answer

tl;dr

sort -k1.5 file | uniq -s 6 -w 5

Explanation

My sort is GNU coreutils 8.22. The manpage for my sort shows:

KEYDEF is F[.C][OPTS][,F[.C][OPTS]] for start and stop position, where F is a field number and  C
       a  character  position  in  the  field;  both are origin 1, and the stop position defaults to the
       line's end.

So with your current sort command, sort -k1,1 file uses the first word to the first word as the sort.

What you want is (for the sort command anyway):

sort -k1.5 file | uniq -s 6 -w 5

This will use the fifth character of the first word, which is what you wanted.

Related Solutions

Shell – How to sort objects by third column in Powershell

Try something like this:

Import-CSV C:\Path\To\File.txt -Header ('foo', 'bar', 'wombat') -delimiter ' ' | Sort-Object wombat

I'll leave my original answer since it meets the criteria as long as the input has well defined columns. Based on the comments, the solution is to sort the array at creation:

$allfiles=get-childitem $inputpath -rec | Where-Object {!($_.psiscontainer)} | Sort-Object Name
cd $inputpath
foreach ($file in $allfiles) {cksum.exe $file | Out-File -Append $pathtooutputfile}

Unexpected result from sort command of linux bash

It appears that your locale's sorting preferences where the issue. You can specify it in your environment, then any command that uses it (including sort) will obey it:

export LC_COLLATE=C
sort -k 1,1 -k 2,2n foo.txt

Or you can specify that value just for the duration of the sort itself

LC_COLLATE=C sort -k 1,1 -k 2,2n foo.txt       # or
env LC_COLLATE=C sort -k 1,1 -k 2,2n foo.txt