Bash associative array sorting by value

Question

I get the following output:

Pushkin - 100500  Gogol - 23  Dostoyevsky - 9999 

Which is the result of the following script:

for k in "${!authors[@]}" do     echo $k ' - ' ${authors["$k"]} done    

All I want is to get the output like this:

Pushkin - 100500  Dostoyevsky - 9999 Gogol - 23 

which means that the keys in associative array should be sorted by value. Is there an easy method to do so?

Answer 1

You can easily sort your output, in descending numerical order of the 3rd field:

for k in "${!authors[@]}" do     echo $k ' - ' ${authors["$k"]} done | sort -rn -k3 

See sort(1) for more about the sort command. This just sorts output lines; I don't know of any way to sort an array directly in bash.

I also can't see how the above can give you names ("Pushkin" et al.) as array keys. In bash, array keys are always integers.