Sorting alphabetically in Bash

Question

I have a file with the following data in it:

adam
humanities

castiel
sciences

antwon
sciences

dmitri
informatics

zoe
mathematics

bernard
economics

I want to be able to sort the file w.r.t the names of the people so that the output looks like so:

adam
humanities

antwon
sciences

bernard
economics

castiel
sciences

dmitri
informatics

zoe
mathematics

cat filename | sort sorts all the data including the subjects. How do I sort it with the names of people?

Answer 1

Using asorti in awk to sort the array of data

awk '{a[$1]=$2} END {n=asorti(a,c);for (i=1;i<=n;i++) print c[i] "\n" a[c[i]] "\n"}' RS= file
adam
humanities

antwon
sciences

bernard
economics

castiel
sciences

dmitri
informatics

zoe
mathematics

If your awk does not have asorti, try this:

awk '{print $1,$2}' RS="" file | sort | awk '{print $1 "\n" $2 "\n"}'

Answer 2

It is a quite brutal solution, but works... :) You can make it look better. The main idea is to create

<name>|<occupation>\n 

list, and sort it than make it look as the original.

cat /tmp/delme | sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/|/g' | sed -e 's/||/\n|/g' | sort | sed -e 's/|/\n/g'

Answer 3

Use awk - strip the empty lines and print each record separated by colon say. Then sort and then using awk print the record in the required format.

awk -v RS="" -F"\n" '{print $1 ":" $2}' e | sort | awk -v FS=":" '{print $1 "\n" $2 "\n"}'