I have a file with the following data in it:
adam
humanities
castiel
sciences
antwon
sciences
dmitri
informatics
zoe
mathematics
bernard
economics
I want to be able to sort the file w.r.t the names of the people so that the output looks like so:
adam
humanities
antwon
sciences
bernard
economics
castiel
sciences
dmitri
informatics
zoe
mathematics
cat filename | sort sorts all the data including the subjects. How do I sort it with the names of people?
Using asorti in awk to sort the array of data
awk '{a[$1]=$2} END {n=asorti(a,c);for (i=1;i<=n;i++) print c[i] "\n" a[c[i]] "\n"}' RS= file
adam
humanities
antwon
sciences
bernard
economics
castiel
sciences
dmitri
informatics
zoe
mathematics
If your awk does not have asorti, try this:
awk '{print $1,$2}' RS="" file | sort | awk '{print $1 "\n" $2 "\n"}'
It is a quite brutal solution, but works... :) You can make it look better. The main idea is to create
<name>|<occupation>\n
list, and sort it than make it look as the original.
cat /tmp/delme | sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/|/g' | sed -e 's/||/\n|/g' | sort | sed -e 's/|/\n/g'
Use awk - strip the empty lines and print each record separated by colon say. Then sort and then using awk print the record in the required format.
awk -v RS="" -F"\n" '{print $1 ":" $2}' e | sort | awk -v FS=":" '{print $1 "\n" $2 "\n"}'
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed '/./!d;$!N;s/\n/ /' file | sort | sed 's/ /\n/g;$!G'
Drop blank lines. Read two lines into the pattern space. Replace newline with space. Sort file. The replace the newlines and add in blank lines.
Not pretty and won't work if your names contain spaces...you probably want a perl solution to do this in a sane and readable way.
$ awk -v RS='\n\n' '{ print $1, $2 }' foo.input | sort | sed -e 's#$#\n#g' -e 's# #\n#g'
adam
humanities
antwon
sciences
bernard
economics
castiel
sciences
dmitri
informatics
zoe
mathematics