bash sort - how do I sort using timestamp

Question

I need to sort a file using shell sort in linux. The sort needs to be based on timestamp values contained within each of file\'s rows. The timestamps are of irregular format

Answer 1

The linux date command does a fine job of parsing dates like this, and it can translate them into more sortable things, like simple unix-time integers.

Example:

cat file | while read line; do
    datestring=$(sed -e 's/^.* t="\([^"]*\)".*$/\1/' <<<"$line")
    echo "$(date -d "$datestring" +%s) $line"
done | sort -n

then you could pass that through the appropriate cut invocation if you want that unix timestamp removed again.