Question

We have a text file called with the following content.

90,Smith,Lauren,10-20-1990
88,Brown,Thomas,09-15-1960
100,Green,Elizabeth,01-03-1988
Note that, each line of the patients.txt file is formatted as id,lastName,firstName,dateOfBirth
Write a unix command to sort the patients alphabetically by last name and print the results to another text file called sortedPatients.txt

Answer 1

Use the Unix command 'sort -t, -k2 patients.txt > sortedPatients.txt' to sort the file by last name and output to another file.

Step-by-step explanation:

To sort the patients.txt file alphabetically by last name and write the output to another text file called sortedPatients.txt, you can use the following Unix command:

sort -t, -k2 patients.txt > sortedPatients.txt

This command uses the sort program of Unix. Here's what each part of the command does:

-t, specifies that the delimiter between fields is a comma.

-k2 tells the sort command to sort the input based on the second field, which is the last name in this case.

The > symbol is used for redirecting the sorted output into the sortedPatients.txt file.

The complete command sort -t',' -k2,2 patients.txt sorts the content of patients.txt alphabetically based on last names and outputs the result. The > operator is then used to redirect the output to a new file called sortedPatients.txt.

The Unix command provided effectively sorts the patients in the patients.txt file alphabetically by last name and saves the sorted results in a new text file called sortedPatients.txt. This command ensures that the order is based on the second field (last name) while considering the comma as the delimiter.