how to sort this in bash

Question

Hello I have a file containing these lines:

apple
12
orange
4
rice
16

how to use bash to sort it by numbers ? Suppose each number is the price for the above object.

I want they are formatted like this:

12 apple
4 orange
16 rice

or

apple 12
orange 4
rice 16

Thanks

Juan Diego Godoy Robles · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-28T12:48:22.553

A solution using paste + sort to get each product sorted by its price:

$ paste - -  < file|sort -k 2nr
rice    16
apple   12
orange  4

Explanation

From paste man:

Write lines consisting of the sequentially corresponding lines from each FILE, separated by TABs, to standard output. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

paste gets the stream coming from the stdin (your <file) and figures that each line belongs to the fictional archive represented by - , so we get two columns using - -

sort use the flag -k 2nr to get paste output sorted by second column in reverse numerical order.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

1

you can use awk:

awk '!(NR%2){printf "%s %s\n" ,$0 ,p}{p=$0}' inputfile

(slightly adapted from this answer)

If you want to sort the output afterwards, you can use sort (quite logically):

awk '!(NR%2){printf "%s %s\n" ,$0 ,p}{p=$0}' inputfile | sort -n

this would give:

4 orange
12 apple
16 rice

edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

Community

1
1

answered Jan 28 '16 at 07:51

Chris Maes

35,025
12
111
136

dinging this solution for ( 1 ) having to use `modulo %` operator, ( 2 ) splitting unnecessary fields, and ( 3 ) `p` updates every row when it should've been every other row – RARE Kpop Manifesto Sep 23 '22 at 15:08

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 28 '16 at 08:00

0

Another solution using awk

$ awk '/[0-9]+/{print prev, $0; next} {prev=$0}' input
apple 12
orange 4
rice 16

answered Jan 28 '16 at 08:00

nu11p01n73R

26,397
3
39
52

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 28 '16 at 15:40

while read -r line1 && read -r line2;do
    printf '%s %s\n' "$line1" "$line2"
done < input_file

If you want lines to be sorted by price, pipe the result to sort -k2:

while read -r line1 && read -r line2;do
    printf '%s %s\n' "$line1" "$line2"
done < input_file | sort -k2

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 22 '22 at 07:57

0

You can do this using paste and awk

$ paste - - <lines.txt | awk '{printf("%s %s\n",$2,$1)}'
12 apple
4 orange
16 rice

answered Sep 22 '22 at 07:57

Logan Lee

807
9
21

If you are using Awk anyway, you can get rid of the `paste` trivially; but then this simply repeats solutions from earlier answers. – tripleee Sep 22 '22 at 08:05

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 23 '22 at 14:55

0

an awk-based solution without needing external paste / sort, using regex, calculating modulo % of anything, or awk/bash loops

{m,g}awk '(_*=--_) ? (__ = $!_)<__ : ($++NF = __)_' FS='\n'

12 apple
4 orange
16 rice

answered Sep 23 '22 at 14:55

RARE Kpop Manifesto

2,453
3
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how to sort this in bash

6 Answers6