I've got a comma-separated file that looks like this:
100,00869184
6492,8361
1234,31
200,04071
I want to use sort to sort this file numerically by the first column only.
Desired Result:
100,00869184
200,04071
1234,31
6492,8361
How do I achieve this using sort? It seems like the commas are being treated like thousands separators instead of delimiters even when I call them out as such.
Both sort -t',' -n and sort -t',' -nk1' give me this:
1234,31
200,04071
6492,8361
100,00869184
Sorting by the default (no parameters) or using sort -t',' gives me this:
100,00869184
1234,31
200,04071
6492,8361
And sorting as a number sort -n gives me this:
1234,31
200,04071
6492,8361
100,00869184
How can I use sort to achieve my desired result?
Edited to add: This is for a one-time operation to create a sorted list of about 7 million lines, so workarounds or other unorthodox methods are perfectly acceptable.
Best Answer
This is certainly a dirty workaround, but I figured out a way to do this thanks to @slhck's tip about locales. If a better answer comes along that would be more helpful to others, I'll certainly accept it since this pretty much only works for my specific problem.
I set the locale to Spanish (Bolivian) so that the commas were treated like decimal points, then standard numeric sorting did the trick.