Bash/Linux Sort by 3rd column using custom field seperator

Question

I can\'t seem to sort the following data as I would like;

find output/ -type f -name *.raw | sort 
output/rtp.0.0.raw
output/rtp.0.10.raw
output/rtp.0.11.raw         


        

Answer 1

sort -t'.' -n -k3

to sort the 3th column from smallest to biggest

And if you want to sort from biggest to smallest, you can use '-r' option :

sort -t'.' -n -r -k3

Answer 2

Fedorqui's solution is good (+1), but not all versions of sort support -V. For those versions that do not, you need to do a little more work than fedorqui's original solution. This should suffice:

sort -t. -k2,2 -k3,3 -n

You get a slightly different sort (eg, '05' sorts before '1' instead of after) if you use:

sort -t. -k2g

(Note that -g is also non-standard, and not available in all versions of sort).

Answer 3

This makes it:

$ sort -t'.' -n -k3 a
output/rtp.0.0.raw
output/rtp.0.1.raw
output/rtp.0.2.raw
output/rtp.0.3.raw
output/rtp.0.4.raw
output/rtp.0.5.raw
output/rtp.0.6.raw
output/rtp.0.7.raw
output/rtp.0.8.raw
output/rtp.0.9.raw
output/rtp.0.10.raw
output/rtp.0.11.raw
output/rtp.0.12.raw
output/rtp.0.13.raw
output/rtp.0.14.raw
output/rtp.0.15.raw
output/rtp.0.16.raw
output/rtp.0.17.raw
output/rtp.0.18.raw
output/rtp.0.19.raw
output/rtp.0.20.raw

As you see we need different options:

• -t'.' to set the dot . as the field separator.
• -n to make it numeric sort.
• -k3 to check the 3rd column.

Update

This also makes it:

$ sort -t'.' -V -k2 a
output/rtp.0.0.raw
output/rtp.0.1.raw
output/rtp.0.2.raw
output/rtp.0.3.raw
output/rtp.0.4.raw
output/rtp.0.5.raw
output/rtp.0.6.raw
output/rtp.0.7.raw
output/rtp.0.8.raw
output/rtp.0.9.raw
output/rtp.0.10.raw
output/rtp.0.11.raw
output/rtp.0.12.raw
output/rtp.0.13.raw
output/rtp.0.14.raw
output/rtp.0.15.raw
output/rtp.0.16.raw
output/rtp.0.17.raw
output/rtp.0.18.raw
output/rtp.0.19.raw
output/rtp.0.20.raw

As you see we need different options:

• -t'.' to set the dot . as the field separator.
• -V to make it sort based on version.
• -k2 to check the 2nd column.