I'm trying to sort some data using sort. I noticed it was sorting by digit rather than number, so I added the -n flag. It then seemingly only numerically sorts on the first field though. Breaking it down by field is a problem as the lines have varying numbers of fields (and, frankly, I cannot understand its behaviour). Here's some close-enough sample data I was playing with:
echo -e "b b 1\n23 44\nb 3\na 7\nb b 2\na 1\nb a 10\nb b 10\nb 1\nb a 1\n18 2\nb 10\n18 15\nb a 2\n23 9\nb 2" | sort -n
Input Want Expect? sort -n -n -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -k4,4…
b b 1 8 2 a 1 23 44 a 1 b a 1
23 44 8 15 a 7 23 9 a 7 b a 10
b 3 23 9 b a 1 8 15 b 1 b a 2
a 7 23 44 b a 2 8 2 b 10 b b 1
b b 2 a 1 b a 10 a 1 b 2 b b 10
a 1 a 7 b b 1 a 7 b 3 b b 2
b a 10 b 1 b b 2 b 1 b a 1 a 1
b b 10 b 2 b b 10 b 10 b a 10 b 1
b 1 b 3 b 1 b 2 b a 2 b 2
b a 1 b 10 b 2 b 3 b b 1 b 3
8 2 b a 1 b 3 b a 1 b b 10 a 7
b 10 b a 2 b 10 b a 10 b b 2 b 10
8 15 b a 10 8 2 b a 2 8 15 8 2
b a 2 b b 1 8 15 b b 1 8 2 8 15
23 9 b b 2 23 9 b b 10 23 44 23 9
b 2 b b 10 23 44 b b 2 23 9 23 44
Ideally, I'd like to get it working on that very machine, which has GNU coreutils sort 5.93. I'd like to handle it with simple unix tools; I don't want to just hand the problem to perl, etc. I'm hoping for an equivalent of the [imaginary] sort --numeric-sort --all-fields --actually-work
Best Answer
With the benefit given by some years of development,
sort -Vonsort 8.26produces just the wanted output: