Command-Line – How to Sort by Row from Terminal

command linescriptstext processing

I was looking at this question and I wondered if the following could be done from terminal. I did it in python, just want to see if it could be done from terminal, bash scripting or whatever.

Suppose I have a file that looks like so:

2,4,5,14,9
40,3,5,10,1

could it be sorted like so, by rows (lines)

2,4,5,9,14
1,3,5,10,40

or is it too complicated? I did it using python, I just want to know if it could be done so next time I might not use python. What I have done, is creating lists and sorting them.

Best Answer

Here's another Perl approach:

perl -F, -lane 'print join ",",sort {$a<=>$b} @F' file.txt

And another shell/coreutils one (though personally, I prefer steeldriver's excellent answer which uses the same idea):

while read line; do 
    tr , $'\n' < <(printf -- "%s" "$line") | sort -g | tr $'\n' , | sed 's/,$/\n/';
done < file.txt

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Comparing two text files

Try this command:

 grep -v -f file2.csv file1.csv > file3.csv

According to grep manual:

  -f FILE, --file=FILE
          Obtain  patterns  from  FILE,  one  per  line.   The  empty file
          contains zero patterns, and therefore matches nothing.   (-f  is
          specified by POSIX.)

  -v, --invert-match
          Invert the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines.  (-v
          is specified by POSIX.)

As Steeldriver said in his comment is better add also -x and -F that:

  -F, --fixed-strings
          Interpret PATTERN as a  list  of  fixed  strings,  separated  by
          newlines,  any  of  which is to be matched.  (-F is specified by
          POSIX.)
  -x, --line-regexp
          Select  only  those  matches  that exactly match the whole line.
          (-x is specified by POSIX.)

So, better command is:

 grep -xvFf file2.csv file1.csv > file3.csv

This command use file2.csv line as pattern and print line of file1.csv that doesn't match (-v).

Ubuntu – Bash: Regular Expressions in substitution

The parameter expansion's substitution doesn't work with regular expressions. extglob can help you here, but it doesn't work with regular expressions, either.

The correct syntax for the expression under extglob is

re='+([0-9])'

i.e. a digit one or more times.

Test:

re='+([0-9])'
echo $'word5word\nword55word' | while read line ; do
    new_line=${line/"word"$re"word"/"word"125"word"}
    echo "$new_line"
done

Output:

word125word
word125word

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Comparing two text files

Ubuntu – Bash: Regular Expressions in substitution

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