Hi,

As your information, I have a text file which are contain a sample data as below:-

1&20070102&string3&string4....
2&20070101&string3&string4....
3&20061212&&string3&string4....

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Based on the sample data, I want to open the text file and sort the data based on the date (second &-delimited field) and the expected output data would be:-

3&20061212&&string3&string4....
2&20070101&string3&string4....
1&20070102&string3&string4....

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Could somebody help me how to do this ?

Previously I have write the program as below but its not working on the last part, why this case happened ?

 opendir(INDIR, $outdir) or die ("$indir not found\n");
        while (my $infile = readdir(INDIR)) {
                chomp;
                next if $infile !~ /postpaid/;

                #change & to space for sorting purpose
                qx(cat $outdir/$infile |sed 's/\&/\t/g' > $outdir/$inf
+ile.tmp);

                #sort the data based on date or second colum
                qx(cat $outdir/$infile.tmp |sort -2 > $outdir/$infile.
+srt);

                #change back the space to &
                #NOTE: This one not working
                qx(cat $outdir/$infile.srt |sed 's/\t/\&/g' > $outdir/
+$infile.ok);

                #remove temporary file
                qx(rm -f $outdir/$infile.tmp);
        }
        closedir(INDIR);

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In reply to How to sort data in the input file ? by bh_perl

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