Hello all!
I am kinda stuck right now and I just don't seem to be able to fathom my mistake.

I am attempting to sort k4, from highest to lowest starting with the number 5.

So I am using this file.

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- restaurants.txt

smart,Parks,6834948,9
italian,Bardellis,6573434,5
steakhouse,Nelsons Eye,6361017,8
steakhouse,Butchers Grill,6741326,7
smart,Joes,6781234,5
steakhouse,Bobs,1967837,3
steakhouse,Fergals,1593579,4
steakhouse,Miras,1472586,5

#I am attempting to sort it using
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awk '$4<5' restaurants.txt | sort -rn -k4
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#Anyone able to enlighten me? All help would be appreciated.

Your main mistake is the delimiter. All Linux functions assume the delimiter is a whitespace or newline unless you tell it otherwise. You need to add the '-F,' argument to awk, and '-t,' argument to sort to switch to comma delimiters.

1 members found this post helpful.

I see, thanks for responding. That helped me out a lot, everything seems to be going smoother so far. By that I mean the -rn actually seems to be working. The awk '$4<5' doesn't appear to be removing anything under five though. But I figure that the problem is as you noted in the,

Hah silly me, I forgot the -F it all worked out. Thank you!

No problem!

You can mark the thread as "Solved" under Thread Tools at the top of the page if you're satisfied with the solution.

Might just be me, but after you set the delimiter correctly for awk you will only be print lines where the fourth field is less than 5. So you will not be 'removing anything under five though', you will
only print the items under 5.

As I say, I might have missed what you were trying to do?