Hi Charles, There are a few ways of doing this that I can think of. First, you could use the linux sort utility, that does let one sort by columns, so the second column in your case. There are two different ports of that to win32 here:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ Or you can get it using cygwin: http://www.cygwin.com/ Both those options would be from the command line. Other programs, like vim, can also sort for you: http://www.vim.org/download.php It can be done in Calc, too, but I'm not sure about doing it from the command line. In Calc, if you open the file, you should get the text import dialog, and you should be able to specify a space as the field separator. Then, simply select all the data, from first row to last and first column to last, and go to "Data | Sort". In the sort dialog, choose the second column as the first sort key. If the second column on its own is likely to have duplicates, set the third column as the second sort key. Repeat for as many columns as necessary to ensure that you will have unique sort keys. As I said, it can be done in Calc, but I don't see how that could be done from the command line. If you really want the command line, my advice would be to install one of the win32 ports of unix tools, and use that sort command. Hope this helps Paul On Mon, 17 Mar 2014 14:32:15 -0400 Tanstaafl <tansta...@libertytrek.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm working on a little problem that I'd really like to resolve. It > doesn't really have anything to do with Libreoffice, other than I > thought I might be able to use Calc to do the sort... > > I have a text file. Each line is one record. > > I can use the raw windows Sort command to sort the file, and that > works fine, but I need to sort it based on the second column, not the > first, and the windows sort command doesn't allow this. > > The columns are separated by a space, but to complicate matters, the > second column can contain multiple space separated words. > > All I need to do is sort the file based on the text found AFTER the > first space on each line (ie, the second column). > > Is it maybe possible to do this somehow with Calc on the command line? > > Or, does anyone have any other ideas? > > Thanks, > > Charles > -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted