Question

I have a file which has multiple columns, whitespace separated.
e.g:

data1             data2          data3                data4
val1              val2            val3                  val4 

I need to sort the file based on values in different columns, i.e sometime based on value of column 1 sometime based on value of col2 and so on.

I thought of sort command but couldn’t figure out how to use it to accomplish this.

Thanx,

Answer 1

It’s easy if you give up on sorting in place:

sort -k 1 original > by_col_1
sort -k 2 original > by_col_2