What's the easiest way to sort a comma separated list of values in Mac OS X:
Input: "a, b, aaa, bc"
Output: "a, aaa, b, bc"
I'd like to do this from the terminal so that I can pipe the output to another command.
+2
A:
$ echo "a, b, Aaa, bc" |egrep -o "[^, ]+" |sort -f | xargs |sed -e 's/ /, /g'
if the values contain spaces:
$ echo "a, b, Aaa, bc" |egrep -o "[^, ][^,]*" |sort -f | xargs -I Q echo Q, | xargs
but then you get an extra ", " for free at the end.
mvds
2010-08-10 00:40:44
That's cool, I didn't know about xargs.
Abdullah Jibaly
2010-08-10 00:55:16
`man xargs` is good reading, and connecting it to `find -print0` is also good basic knowledge.
mvds
2010-08-10 02:21:48
+1
A:
echo "a, b, Aaa, bc"|tr -s "[, ]" "\n"|sort|sed -e :a -e 'N;s/\n/,/;ba'
echo "a, b, Aaa, bc"| tr -s "[, ]" "\n"|sort|tr "\n" ","|sed 's/,$//'
ghostdog74
2010-08-10 01:03:19
There's something going wrong in the sed portion, I like the use of tr though.
Abdullah Jibaly
2010-08-10 01:13:51
A:
echo 'a, b, aaa, bc' | awk '{split($0, a, ", "); n = asort(a); for (i=1; i<=n; i++) {printf a[i]; if (i<n) printf ", "}}'
Dennis Williamson
2010-08-10 01:41:56