Sort Date/Time in Unix

Question

Input

2012-07-24 10:05:08 AM
2012-07-26 10:13:58 AM
2012-07-24 10:13:58 AM
2012-07-24 10:57:50 AM
2012-07-24 11:15:03 AM
2012-07-24 11:26:08 PM
2012-07-25 11:26:08 PM

Desired Output

2012-07-24 10:05:08 AM
2012-07-24 10:13:58 AM
2012-07-24 10:57:50 AM
2012-07-24 11:15:03 AM
2012-07-24 11:26:08 PM
2012-07-25 11:26:08 PM
2012-07-26 10:13:58 AM

Code I tried

 sort -t ":" -k 1 -k 2 -k 3 Input.txt | sort -t " " -k 3

But I am not getting desired output.

Can anyone suggest anything?

---

I wrote a code... but still problem persists...

Code

 sed 's/ 12:/00:/g' Input.txt | sort -k 1,1 -k 3,3 -k 2,2 | sed 's/00:/12:/g'

First change 12:43:01 AM to 00:43:01 AM....and then apply sort command.

Answer 1

Convert to Epoch Seconds for Sorting

Assuming that your data is stored in /tmp/foo, you can convert the timestamp into a numerically-sortable format with GNU date. For example:

date -f /tmp/foo '+%s' | sort |
while read; do
    date -d "@$REPLY" "+%F %I:%M:%S %p"
done

This should correctly handle the sort in all cases, and especially the cases where all AM times should come before all PM times on the same date. For example, 12:01 AM is now listed before 10:00 PM.