I have a file like below:

gina, crab.george, john, joe, crab.mckay

Get rid of the 'crab.' and sort the rest of the output. I expect the output to be like:

george, gina, joe, john, mckay

Any help appreciated.

This smells like homework (and quite a cute test too)...

Anyhow, here's one way. Use 'sed' to remove crab, the commas and to add a newline. You now have your input as a column, which 'sort' can sort. Then use awk to re-add the commas and transform the column back to a row.

Damian

Hi Damian,

Oops sorry but this fails.

When I execute:

echo "gina, crab.george, john, joe, crab.mckay" | sed 's/crab\.//g;s/, */\/g' | sort | awk '{printf (comma"%s",$0); comma=","}'

It says:

sed: command garbled: s/crab\.//g;s/, */

Am I missing out on something or doing something wrong.

Yahoo

No, you ARE doing something wrong...

The newline that I included in the sed command (after the '\') is necessary.