sort fields

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a large csv file that looks like this:

14   ,M0081,\+000000001,200302,\+00000100500, 
14   ,M0081,\+000000004,200301,\+00000100500, 
14   ,M0081,\+000000005,200305,\+00000100500, 
14   ,M0081,\+000000000,200205,\+00000100500, 
14   ,M0081,\+000000008,200204,\+00000100500,

I need to sort on the first, second and fourth fields so that it would look like this:

14   ,M0081,\+000000008,200204,\+00000100500,
14   ,M0081,\+000000000,200205,\+00000100500, 
14   ,M0081,\+000000004,200301,\+00000100500,
14   ,M0081,\+000000001,200302,\+00000100500, 
14   ,M0081,\+000000005,200305,\+00000100500, 
 

I'm looking at sort -k but haven't got it yet

Thanks

2

this seems to do the trick:

sort -t, -k 1,2 -k 4,4

3

Look at the manpage for sort.

Near the bottom it gives good examples of how to sort by column.

sort(1) sort(1)

  Print the password file \(/etc/passwd\) sorted by numeric user ID \(the
  third colon-separated field\):

       sort -t: -k 3n,3 /etc/passwd

  Print the lines of the presorted file infile, suppressing all but the
  first occurrence of lines having the same third field:

       sort -mu -k 3,3 infile