doing a sort on first two fields

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi,

i'm having a file stg_ff.txt
which contains 10 fields,which contains millions of records

i need to cat the first 10 rows in the file after doing a sorting on the first two fields i n the file.
can any body help me on this.

regards
Angel

2

millions of records ?

it is any table data dump from the db ? ( if yes, then you can sort it in the db itself, as you may have some index -which is faster)

sorting the millions of records takes time in unix commands :frowning:

3

I agree with itkamaraj but still if you want to try on unix.

try this one, assuming ; is delimiter

sort -t ";" -k1,2 file_test| head -10
4

try this ( assuming ";" as delimiter):-

head -10 stg_ff.txt | awk -F  ";"  '{ print $1," ",$2}' | sort
5

this should suffice for the first 10 lines

head -10 stg_ff.txt | sort -k1,2