Sort packs of lines alphabetically

command linesortingsublime-text-2

Note: the complementary question is here: How to separately sort lines within multiple “chunks” separated with headers?

So what I did find an answer to, is how to sort lines in a text files alphabetically.
But, it is not exactly what I need to do.
I have this file with profiles containing 15 different parameters that goes into an instrument at work and is read by the machine to have a list of profiles.

Sadly, the formatting of this file looks like this:

[ProfileB]
param1=z
param2=y
param3=x
[ProfileA]
param1=k
param2=l
param3=

And I want to sort the Profiles alphabetically, but I need them to stay grouped with their parameters. The above example should be sorted like this:

[ProfileA]
param1=k
param2=l
param3=
[ProfileB]
param1=z
param2=y
param3=x

I guess there is something to work either with the fixed number of lines (name+parameters) or with the character "[" as an identifier for the beginning of a group of lines.

But this is beyond my capacity in text manipulation.
I have at my disposition either Sublime Text, R, or Linux command console.

Best Answer

This works in my Debian:

sed '1 ! s/^\[/\x00\[/g' | sort -z | tr -d "\0"

To work with file(s) use redirection(s), e.g. { sed … ; } <input.txt >output.txt, where sed … is the whole command.

The procedure is as follows:

  1. sed inserts a null character before every [ that is in the beginning of a line, unless the line is the first one. This way null characters separate profiles.
  2. sort -z uses these null characters as separators, so it sorts whole profiles, not separate lines.
  3. tr deletes null characters.
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