Re: 'sort' command -- support more than one field-delimiter

[Dragan Simic]

On 2023-10-18 13:48, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> Using the initial example:
>
>   SUSE 10.2 12/7/2006
>
> In natural language, the problem could be described as:
>   - with ' ' as the delimiter,
>   - take the 3rd field,
>   - there, with '/' as delimiter,
>   - sort by key 3, 1 and 2 numerically.
>
> Therefore, melting the delimiters into a list like ...
>
> > $ sort --field-separators=" /" -n -k5 -k3 -k4 file1.txt
>
> ... would not tell correctly which keys to sort by, would it?

Perhaps we could use something like this, which would make sort(1) build 
the set of sort rules as the command-line options are encountered, in 
the specified order:

  sort -t ' ' -k 3 -n -t '/' -k 3,2,1

However, it might me a bit too complicated and thus impractical.