Sorting of multi-column output
 

How to sort a command's output by a specific column? Let's say output of NETSTAT to sort by State column?

check out the 'cut' utility

if you wanted the 3rd column of netstat output you could execute

netstat | cut -f3

jpbarto

Maybe my question isn't accurate enough. I meant not change the output of a command but to sort it sophisticated, based on a pattern rather than on a column number.

so sorry... bout the closest I can get is 'netstat | sort +4' need to strip the header information first though... otherwise its really ugly.

:-) netstat was just as an example but i'm ok to stick on it. Here is an output I got:
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:1521 127.0.0.1:32774 ESTABLISHED
tcp 0 0 10.10.0.95:139 10.10.0.91:3486 ESTABLISHED

how to sort it on a port number of local address?

if all you want is information on 127.0.0.1 I'd imagine you could (and sorry if I'm getting problem specific again) either specify in netstat only 127.0.0.1 or a more general solution would be to pipe netstat to grep to sort

netstat | grep 127\.0\.0\.1:[0-9]* | sort +3

Thanks for advice but netstat is not the point. lEt's take another example:
ls -all -1
brings output like:
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 cvs cvs 11411 Jul 19 15:33 dirs
-rw-rw-r-- 1 cvs cvs 397 Apr 10 10:38 files
...

I wanna sort _all_ the lines by minues (two digits coming after columns). This is just an example born by the original question:
how to sort output by pattern?

I see... well in that case you got me stumped... as far as I know there's no hard and fast way to do that ... how do you feel about bash or perl scripting?

I'm not a guru in shell scripting at all:-) AFAIK awk could help and hoped to get help here.

All my reference books are at work... and to be honest I've never used awk (never had a need) but I'll try to help however I can.

Finally I found what I was looking for. So, to sort output of "ls -all" by minute (as number) here is a command:

ls -al | awk '{a=$8;sub(/.*:/,"",a);print a, $0}' | sort | awk '{sub(/[^ ]* /,"",$0);print}'


(This example originally is posted by Chuck Demas)

I think this can be done a lot smaller:

ls -al | sort +1n -t:

But both your and my solution are flawed (when using ls -al as example).....

The time/date field in ls -al has more formats: YYYY or HH:MM
We both use the : as field seperator, which is not going to work for the YYYY format.