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Re: Does sort -2,3n work properly?
From: |
Pádraig Brady |
Subject: |
Re: Does sort -2,3n work properly? |
Date: |
Fri, 17 Jan 2014 11:26:15 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130110 Thunderbird/17.0.2 |
On 01/17/2014 10:37 AM, Bartosz Gołaszewski wrote:
> Hi,
>
> for the following input:
> 42 1 3 woot
> 42 1 010 zoology
> egg 1 2 papyrus
> 7 3 42 soup
> 999 3 0 algebra
>
> this is what debug-enabled sort in coreutils 8.22 outputs:
>
> % sort --debug ./input -k2,3n
> sort: using simple byte comparison
> sort: key 1 is numeric and spans multiple fields
So these are warning messages indicating a usage issue.
The specific one here is you've _spanned_ multiple fields
but numeric compares auto terminate at the first numbers.
> 42 1 010 zoology
> _
> _______________________________
> 42 1 3 woot
> _
> ____________________________
> egg 1 2 papyrus
> _
> _______________________________
> 7 3 42 soup
> _
> ____________________________
> 999 3 0 algebra
> _
> _______________________________
>
> It seems as if only the second field was used in comparison, even
> though sort knows that the key 'spans multiple fields'. Is this a
> correct behaviour? If so - could anyone explain why?
You probably want to compare multiple fields in sequence. I.E.
sort -k2,2n -k3,3n
thanks,
Pádraig.