Question

I have a script to sort respect to certain column in a for loop. I would like to skip the header in the sorting process but I’m failing. This is what I have:

for i in file* 
do
  sort -k 1,1 -k 3,3n -t\; ${i} > h${i}
  rm ${i}
done

How to skip the the header in the sorting process but keep it in the output?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Is header the first line of the file?
If it is, try next one:

for i in file* 
do
  head -1 ${i} > h${i}
  sed 1d ${i} | sort -k 1,1 -k 3,3n -t\; >> h${i}
  rm ${i}
done