Hello! i hope somebody can help me. I would like to have help with an shell script(sh) assignment. I have a file and it contains something like the following text: 02gozal:godam:godhar:TGFGK:halllo 23david:david:edsson:FDSFF:halllo 32farad:fazdg:forum:HGHJ:halllo and so on... Now I want a script code to take this file and print out the following text.. (skriptexample.sh textx.txt) 23david david, edsson 32farad fazdg, forum 02gozal godam, godhar and on... The last word should be in a alphabetical order. I have started writing down the code: sort -k3 -t: $1 | cut -f1,2,3 -d':' | after this it get's a little bit confusing while IFS=: read a read b read c do echo "$a $b $c" done So please help me, a really want to know but I don't know what to do :( I hope you can email me and help me /Anja

Hi: Why not use awk to parse the file and sort on the 3rd field: awk ' BEGIN { FS=":" } { printf("%s %s, %s\n", $1, $2, $3) } ' file.txt|sort -k 3,3 Regards, Nails

Hi, a sh solution could be IFS=: sort -k3 -t: bla.txt | while read a b c rest do echo $a $b $c done IFS=' ' No RISK no fun Frank