Sorting on nth column bash issue

Question

I am running the following command to process some CSV data

grep -i "area harvested.*2005" ps1_apricot_countries_2005.csv | sed 's/\"//g'

This results in the following output (top 7 records shown only as sample):

Afghanistan,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,5200.00000,F
Africa +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,59536.00000,A
Albania,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,400.00000,F
Algeria,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,22888.00000,
Americas +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,11496.00000,A
Argentina,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,2200.00000,F
Armenia,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,5300.00000,
Asia +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,272644.00000,A

As it can be seen this is sorted alphabetically on the first column.

I am trying to pipe this into sort so that I can sort the above data in descending order based on the 6th numeric comma separated column.

I tried:

grep -i "area harvested.*2005" ps1_apricot_countries_2005.csv | sed 's/\"//g' | sort -k6rn

However this resulted in the following (top 7 records shown only as sample):

Afghanistan,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,5200.00000,F
Africa +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,59536.00000,A
Albania,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,400.00000,F
Algeria,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,22888.00000,
Americas +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,11496.00000,A
Argentina,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,2200.00000,F
Armenia,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,5300.00000,

It still appears to be sorted on the first column and not the 6th column in descending order. Could anyone please explain how to correct the approach above to achieve this?

Answer 1

You can use this sort:

sort -t, -rnk6

to sort on 6th numeric field descending, delimited by ,.

• -t, is used to tell sort that fields are delimited by comma.
• -rnk6 is used to sort in reverse numerical order on field 6

This will give this output:

Asia +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,272644.00000,A
Africa +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,59536.00000,A
Algeria,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,22888.00000,
Americas +,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,11496.00000,A
Armenia,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,5300.00000,
Afghanistan,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,5200.00000,F
Argentina,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,2200.00000,F
Albania,31,Area Harvested,2005,Ha,400.00000,F