Sorting by date

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I am trying to sort by two columns. The first column in an ID, the second is a date in the form yyyy-mm-dd. I need to sort by the ID column, then in ascending order for the date column (earliest date to most recent date compared to today).

Input data:

012-abc      2012-04-25       
012-abc      2011-07-14
012-abc      2011-06-07
001-def      2012-04-05
001-def      2011-03-04
043-jke       2009-01-13
043-jke      2009-01-31       
043-jke       2012-06-01
043-jke      2011-04-01

Desired output:

001-def         2011-03-04
001-def       2012-04-05
012-abc      2011-06-07       
012-abc      2011-07-14       
012-abc       2012-04-25       
043-jke      2009-01-13
043-jke      2009-01-31
043-jke       2011-04-01       
043-jke       2012-06-01

I tried cat file|sort -t -k1 2.1,2.4n -k 2.6,2.7n -k 2.9,2.10n , but no luck.

2

Not sure I understand the problem:

sort file
001-def 2011-03-04
001-def 2012-04-05
012-abc 2011-06-07
012-abc 2011-07-14
012-abc 2012-04-25
043-jke 2009-01-13
043-jke 2009-01-31
043-jke 2011-04-01
043-jke 2012-06-01
3

use sort on file

---------- Post updated at 05:15 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:15 PM ----------

oops...sorry... RudiC has already replied...

4

Sort by itself didn't work, but I managed to figure it out with sort -t " " -k1,1 -k2,2. Thanks for your responses.