[Discuss] sort by value of last field in a line

[Noel Burton-Krahn]

perl -e 'print(sort { (split(" ", $a))[-1] cmp (split(" ", $b))[-1] } <>)'

1. the <> returns a list of all lines from stdin or filenames in argv

2. the sort sorts them by the split criteria

3. the split() breaks each line into fields, and the [-1] picks the last 
field

Hooray for perl, the self-compressing language!

~Noel


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Xavier Mossman" <xavier.mossman at gmail.com>
To: <discuss at vlug.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 6:10 PM
Subject: [Discuss] sort by value of last field in a line


> hmm this doesn't seem to work for me. multiline file with variable no.
> of space seperated fields per line. need to sort lines on the value of
> the last field in a line. output needs to show all fields for each
> line. getting rid of dups in last field would be so nice
> sort won't let you specify sort on last field when you don't know how
> many fields per line. gawk isn't so friendly for sorting by field
> value - end up trying to sort a multi-dim array so yu can preserve the
> original index - then still need to sort the original array.
> anyone wanna show me up on this? don't care whats used as long as its
> standard shell stuff
>
> tx Xav.
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