Tabs  will  be  treated  as  whitespace.
There is no way to sort on \t exclusively with
the gnu sort in the NetBSD tree, so keep white-
space  out  of  your fields or use fixed length
records or use a non whitespace field seperator
or use sed to replace \t with something else.

Makeup a worst case file to test with.
If you need help, post some example output.


cougar$ cat test.txt
field1  field two9      field4  field4
field2  field two5      field5  field1
field3  field two8      field8  field6
field4  field two4      field4  field7
field5  field two9      field9  field8
field6  field two6      field0  field9
field7  field two3      field1  field0

cougar$ sort -k 3d,3 -k 4d,4  <test.txt
field7  field two3      field1  field0
field4  field two4      field4  field7
field2  field two5      field5  field1
field6  field two6      field0  field9
field3  field two8      field8  field6
field1  field two9      field4  field4
field5  field two9      field9  field8

cougar$ sort -k 3d,3 -k 4dr,4  <test.txt
field7  field two3      field1  field0
field4  field two4      field4  field7
field2  field two5      field5  field1
field6  field two6      field0  field9
field3  field two8      field8  field6
field5  field two9      field9  field8
field1  field two9      field4  field4

cougar$  sort -k 3d,3 -k 4dr,4  <test.txt
field7  field two3      field1  field0
field4  field two4      field4  field7
field2  field two5      field5  field1
field6  field two6      field0  field9
field3  field two8      field8  field6
field5  field two9      field9  field8
field1  field two9      field4  field4


On Sun, Jul 9, 2000 6:16 PM, Lars M Gustafsson <mailto:gumse@gyral.com>
wrote:
>I am trying to sort a tab-separated textfile on column 3 with the "sort" 
>command, 
>but I can't get it to work, any sort wizzards out there ??
>
>Regards,
>L.
>





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