Re: tab as sort's field-separator

[Andrew D Jewell]

What you've got here is a shell problem, not a sort problem.

Although I'm sure I've done it in the past, I can't at the moment 
figure out how to make it happen in tcsh.

One option is to grab the improved textutils from
http://alexautils.sourceforge.net
where all field based tools have '--dt' to specify what you want, as 
part of the Alexa standard :

      --dw       shortcut for the inexpressible --delimiter=WHITESPACE
      --dz       shortcut for --delimiter=ZERO
      --ds       shortcut for --delimiter=SPACE
      --dt       shortcut for --delimiter=TAB
      --De       shortcut for inexpressible --output-delimiter=EMPTY
      --Dz       shortcut for --output-delimiter=ZERO
      --Ds       shortcut for --output-delimiter=SPACE
      --Dt       shortcut for --output-delimiter=TAB


I supposed some sort of tcsh command of the form
/bin/bash -c 'that sort command that wors in bash'
might work.

adj


At 2:26 AM -0400 6/15/02, Jim Fohlin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> It appears that one can't specify just a tab (a tab and only a tab) as
> sort's field-separator.  As shown below, the UNIX example does it
> right whereas the Linux example fails.
>
> Is this a bug/limitation or did I miss the correct way to do this?
>
> I can work around this in bash using:
>         TAB=`echo -e "\t"`
>         sort -t"$TAB" ...
>
> but this trick doesn't work with tcsh using:
>         setenv TAB `/bin/echo -e "\t"`
>
> Must be the different way expressions are expanded with quotes in the
> two shells.
>
> Jim
>
>
> $ cat /tmp/x
> 2       x, a1
> 2       x, b
> 1       x, a2
>
> NB: Each line consists of <digit><tab>x,<space><letter><optionaldigit>
>
> ***
>
> RH 7.2, textutils-2.0.14-2
>
> $ sort -t'\t' -u -k2,2 -k1,1 /tmp/x
> sort: multi-character tab `\t'
>
> ***
>
> Compaq Tru64 UNIX V5.1 (Rev. 732)
>
> % sort -t'\t' -u -k2,2 -k1,1 /tmp/x
> 2       x, a1
> 1       x, a2
> 2       x, b
>
> ***
>
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