POSIX Awk sort array

arrayawkposixsort

I would like to sort an array with POSIX Awk, however I have discovered that:

asort()
asorti()
PROCINFO["sorted_in"]

are all GNU extensions. Can this be done with without GNU Awk?

Best Answer

Here is an example:

function arr_sort(ary,   x, y, z) {
  for (x in arr) {
    y = arr[x]
    z = x - 1
    while (z && arr[z] > y) {
      arr[z + 1] = arr[z]
      z--
    }
    arr[z + 1] = y
  }
}

Source

Related Solutions

Bash – How to sort an associative array and retain the keys

Assuming your keys don't contain colons or newlines and your values don't contain newlines:

for key in "${!MYARRAY[@]}"; do
  printf '%s:%s\n' "$key" "${MYARRAY[$key]}"
done | sort -t : -k 2n

If you need to arrange the key in the order given by the values, read back the output:

IFS=$'\n'; set -f
sorted_keys=($(
    for key in "${!MYARRAY[@]}"; do
      printf '%s:%s\n' "$key" "${MYARRAY[$key]}"
    done | sort -t : -k 2n | sed 's/:.*//'))
unset IFS; set +f

Shell – Sort output of awk except for first line

Here is an example that sorts all lines but the first:

#!/bin/awk -f
BEGIN{cmd="sort"}
NR==1{print;next}
{print $1,$2 | cmd}
END{close(cmd)}

Example

Consider this file:

$ cat file
Letter  Value
A       12
D       10
C       15
B       13

Then:

$ awk -f script.awk file
Letter  Value
A 12
B 13
C 15
D 10

The first input line is the first output line. The remaining lines are sorted.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to sort an associative array and retain the keys

Shell – Sort output of awk except for first line

Example

Related Question