05 Apr 09 Simple text sorting

On the command line we have a number of powerful tools available to us. I’m going to cover some text sorting methods here.

I have a file called ‘testfile’ within this file is the following:

test:~# cat testfile
line1
line3
abcdefg

test
line9

this is a test
test file

test
(more…)

Tags: awk, cat, grep, sed, sort, text sort, uniq

05 Mar 09 BASH Shell Scripting – Sort a string alphabetically

I was asked today how to sort a string alphabetically with BASH

Using perl, you can easily enough use

print (join “”, sort split //,$_)

With bash however, the best option is:

echo “teststring” | grep -o . | sort -n |tr -d ‘\n’; echo
Which returns: eginrssttt

A good way of enumerating each character from a string in general is:

for (( i = 0; i < ${#str[@]}; i++ )); do echo “${str[$i]}”; done

Tags: bash, do, done, echo, for, grep, perl, print, shell, shell scripting, sort, string, tr