linuxsortingunixgnu-sort

How to sort a tab delimited file with sort command?

I have a data with the following format:

foo<tab>1.00<space>1.33<space>2.00<tab>3

Now I tried to sort the file based on the last field decreasingly. I tried the following commands but it wasn't sorted as we expected.

$ sort -k3nr file.txt  # apparently this sort by space as delimiter

$ sort -t"\t" -k3nr file.txt
  sort: multi-character tab `\\t'

$ sort -t "`/bin/echo '\t'`" -k3,3nr file.txt
  sort: multi-character tab `\\t'

What's the right way to do it?

Solution

  • Using bash, this will do the trick:

    $ sort -t$'\t' -k3 -nr file.txt

    Notice the dollar sign in front of the single-quoted string. You can read about it in the ANSI-C Quoting sections of the bash man page.