Unix Sorting Problem

Question

My sorting doesn't work for numbers (k3 to k6) but it works for k1 and k2 which are alphabets. How to sort for k3 to k6? Thanks for you help.

data:

MacOS X for dummies:Mary Abraham:53.48:88:38

code:

awk -F":" '{ printf "%-30s %-20s %-10.2f %-10d %-10d %s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, "$"$3 * $5 }' BookDB.txt | sort -nk3

Not sure if this is available on Mac OS' version of sort but you can specify the separator field to ":" instead of the default whitespace: sort -t':' -n -k3,3 — Apprentice Queue
– Apprentice Queue, Commented Jan 29, 2011 at 1:46

luke h · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-29 01:34:13Z

Looks like the spaces in the book title and author name are causing sort to miscount the columns, If you print a seperator character like '|' between each field in awk, then you can use sed to temporarily replace all the spaces like so,

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