Question

I have some huge log files I need to sort. All entries have a 32 bit hex number which is the sort key I want to use.
some entries are one liners like

bla bla bla  0x97860afa bla bla  

others are a bit more complex, start with the same type of line above and expand to a block of lines marked by curly brackets like the example below. In this case the entire block has to move to the position defined by the hex nbr. Block example-

 bla bla bla  0x97860afc bla bla  
     bla bla {  
         blabla  
            bla bla {  
                bla     
            }  
        }  

I can probably figure it out but maybe there is a simple perl or awk solution that will save me 1/2 day.

---

Transferring comments from OP:

Indentation can be space or tab, I can enhance that on any proposed solution, I think that Brian summarizes well: Specifically, do you want to sort “items” which are defined as a chunk of text that starts with a line containing a “0xNNNNNNNN”, and contains everything up to (but not including) the next line which contains a “0xNNNNNNNN” (where the N’s change, of course). No lines interspersed.

Answer 1

Something like this might work (Not tested):

my $line;
my $lastkey;
my %data;
while($line = <>) {
    chomp $line;
    if ($line =~ /\b(0x\p{AHex}{8})\b/) {
        # Begin a new entry
        my $unique_key = $1 . $.; # cred to [Brian Gerard][1] for uniqueness
        $data{$1} = $line;
        $lastkey = $unique_key;
    } else {
        # Continue an old entry
        $data{$lastkey} .= $line;
    }
}

print $data{$_}, "\n" for (sort { $a <=> $b } keys %data);

The problem is that you said “huge” log files, so storing the file in memory will probably be inefficient. However, if you want to sort it, I suspect you’re going to need to do that.

If storing in memory is not an option, you can always just print the data to a file instead, with a format that will allow you to sort it by some other means.