I have a file which is a group of records with fields (variable-length) seperated by a ":" example,
(first_name:last_name:soc-sec#:title:Hire_date) where date in is the form of 03-12-1999 for example.
I try to use the command (like my book says) to sort the records according to the hire_date. I have to sort it by the fields. So I tried the commands:

sort -+: +4 filename or
sort -t:+4 filename

but neither of these work and I get errors.

Got some info and exmples on the sort options for my book seams to be lacking?

I don't think that sort will every work for this application. With the way that you have your dates formatted, sort will always sort by the months before it ever considers a year. Take the following list of data:

• 03-04-1999
• 04-15-2000
• 01-15-2001

You run the values through sort and you get these results:

• 01-15-2001
• 03-04-1999
• 04-15-2000

You can see that it is completly wrong. Sort will only look at the year if the month and days are the same.

The only way that sort will work is if you dates are in the form: YYYYMMDD. This way it will look at year, month then day. It would sort this correctly. You could always convert the dates to the above format and then sort.

Good Luck

Gary

Actually, I found the answer from a friend in class.
Where the record had fields seperated by a ":' and the date was in the form of 02-12-1999 for example, we used the syntax:

sort -t : -k 9.7,9.10 filename

this was sort by the 9th field (-k) starting at the 7th character thru the 9th field 10th character, where the delimiter (-t) was the colon :

But thanks anyway.