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 > >*** > >_______________________________________________ >Bug-textutils mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils
