Re: sort -g (generic numeric) is working only for the first key

[Andreas Schwab]

Erik Auerswald <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Wasim,
>
> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 08:09:43PM +0530, Wasim Akram S.N. wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I don't know whether the following is really a bug.
>> ...
>> address@hidden:~/temp$ sort -g -k1,3 -t \t a
>
> This tells sort to regard the first three fields as one key. I think
> you need something like "sort -g -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -t \t a" which uses
> the three fields as three keys.

This won't work either since the separator 't' does not occur in the
input.  If you want a TAB character as a separator (assuming there are
really TABs between the fields in the input) you need to pass a literal
TAB as the argument to -t.  With bash you can do that with -t $'\t'.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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