As an old awk head I would first reach for this simple perl-based approach:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

$/ = '#';
print sort (<DATA>);

__DATA__
#12346
orange
#12345
apple
banana
#12344
pear

[download]

Note that this uses a lexical sort which somewhat coincidentally works for the given data set. If your actual data set is more varied you will probably need to use a different sorting block.

In reply to Re: Ordering data in a file. by hippo
in thread Ordering data in a file. by tracer

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