sort by datetime format in bash

Question

this is an example of my data

ip=1.2.3.4, setup_time=05:58:38.617 GMT Tue Mar 16 2021, foo=moshe, bar=haim
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 16 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2

i would like to be able to sort by the setup_time column in bash. I know that I can't use sort because sort allow only sort by string matching and this is not a format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss so string sorting is not possible.

so any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

thank you

#update

ok to better understand what i'm trying to achieve i created the folowing file named 1:

ip=1.2.3.4, setup_time=06:58:38.617 GMT Tue Mar 16 2021, foo=moshe, bar=haim
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 17 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=06:50:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 18 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2

so I executed this:

cat 1 | sed 's/, /!/g' | sort -t '!' -k2,2

what i did here is replaced , with ! so i can use a delimiter in sort, the problem is that sort is doing string sorting and not timestamp kind of sorting so the output is:

ip=2.3.4.5!setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 17 2021!foo=moshe2!bar=haim2
ip=2.3.4.5!setup_time=06:50:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 18 2021!foo=moshe2!bar=haim2
ip=1.2.3.4!setup_time=06:58:38.617 GMT Tue Mar 16 2021!foo=moshe!bar=haim

Answer 1

Sort is able to deal with month names, thanks to the option M

No need to change , into !. Use the white space as delimiter and just issue:

LC_ALL=en sort -k7nr -k5Mr -k6nr -k2r sample

If you use this as content of the file sample:

ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Apr 1 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 17 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=1.2.3.4, setup_time=06:58:38.617 GMT Tue Mar 16 2021, foo=moshe, bar=haim
ip=1.2.3.4, setup_time=06:58:38.617 GMT Tue Feb 28 2021, foo=moshe, bar=haim
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=06:50:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 18 2020, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=06:50:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 18 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2

you will get this as output:

ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Apr 1 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=06:50:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 18 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=05:59:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 17 2021, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2
ip=1.2.3.4, setup_time=06:58:38.617 GMT Tue Mar 16 2021, foo=moshe, bar=haim
ip=1.2.3.4, setup_time=06:58:38.617 GMT Tue Feb 28 2021, foo=moshe, bar=haim
ip=2.3.4.5, setup_time=06:50:30.260 GMT Tue Mar 18 2020, foo=moshe2, bar=haim2

Specifying -k7 means to sort on the seventh field. The r option reverses the order of sorting to descending. The M option sorts according the name of the month. The n option sorts numerically. To sort on the time, just consider the whole second field (beginning with the string setup_time=) as a fixed length string using -k2.

LC_ALL=en in the begin of the command line tells the system to use the English names of the months.