[NTLUG:Discuss] Sort question

[Chris Cox]

On 04/05/2012 07:39 PM, Fred James wrote:
> Chris Cox wrote:
>> first tr should be '[0-9]' get rid of the carat
>>
>>> Chris Cox wrote:
>>>> My soln in bourne shell script:
>>>> #!/bin/sh
>>>> while read line;do
>>>> echo "$line" | tr -cs '[^0-9]' '\012' | sort -n | tr '\012' ' '
>>>> echo ""
>>>> done
>>>>
>>>> To use: sh thescript.sh <thedatafile
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Very nice
>>> Regards
>>> Fred James
> Chris Cox
> I had wondered about the carat ... but it works in either case ... ¿Por qué, me
> pregunto?

A reasonable question... you could tell had forgotten about the -c option to 
complement the character set.. maybe that's the "answer" if you will... the 
reason why.. maybe carat has no meaning in that case since it's complementing 
the whole set?  Just a guess.  The -s eliminates the extra non numerics (things 
in the complemented set) no matter how many there are (reduces them down to 1, 
in case anyone wonders).  In short, just give me the numbers and the -cs 
compresses the rest to make the numbers followed by a newline... this would 
allow the input to look like:

"53","17","3","24","9","33"

even.... but the output would just be the numbers sorted with space as the 
separator... again, in case you wondered... however, will have some leading 
white space.