bug#33371: RFC: option for numeric sort: ignore-non-numeric characters

[Eric Blake]

On 11/13/18 8:32 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
> I have a bunch of files numbered from 1-over 2000 without leading zeros
> (think rfc's)...
> They have names with a non-numeric prefix & suffix around the number.
>
> It would be nice if sort had the option to ignore non-numeric
> data and only sort on the numeric data in the 'lines'/'files'.
>
> Yeah, I can renumber and rename them all, but I just wanted
> an instant command that could sort numeric values even if embedded
> in a line, where the "field" was determined by the start/stop of
> numeric characters.
>
> Or is there an options for this already, and my manpage out of date?

Without ACTUAL data to experiment with, it's much harder for anyone else 
to propose a solution that will work with your specific data.

But one quick approach comes to mind: decorate-sort-undecorate:

sed 's/^\([^0-9]*\)\([0-9]*\)/\2 \1\2/' < myinput \
  | sort -k1,1n | sed 's/^[0-9]* //' > myoutput

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
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