Text Processing – How to Numerical Sort by Last Column

sorttext processing

I have this input:

sdkxyosl 1
safkls 2
asdf--asdfasxy_asd 5
dkd8k  jasd 29
sdi44sw 43
asasd afsdfs 10
rklyasd 4

I need this output:

sdi44sw 43
dkd8k  jasd 29
asasd afsdfs 10
asdf--asdfasxy_asd 5
rklyasd 4
safkls 2
sdkxyosl 1

So i need to sort the lines by the last column.

I don't know how many columns are in one line.

I just can't figure it out, how to do it. I don't have "perl powers". I just have ~average scripting powers with sed, awk, cut, etc..

Does somebody know how to do it?

Best Answer

The following command line uses awk to prepend the last field of each line of file.txt, does a reverse numerical sort, then uses cut to remove the added field:

awk '{print $NF,$0}' file.txt | sort -nr | cut -f2- -d' '
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