'sort' giving me heartburn

[Coderifous]

Hey all,

I'm a perl guy, and not really a stranger to unix, not a guru either (about to be obvious).

I'm needing to sort some data, and I'm getting screwy results. I'll post a line or two of notional data, and then the sort command I'm using.

Notional Data: (substitut dashes for spaces; s/-/ /g

--3---W1234537831234--EA00001--BLAHBLAHBLAH----------------------------------223
--3---W1234537841234--EA00001--BLAHBLAHBLAH----------------------------------013
--3---W1234637891234--EA00001--BLAHBLAHBLAH----------------------------------123
--3---W1834537891234--EA00001--BLAHBLAHBLAH----------------------------------023

Remember: There are no dashes, I put them here to keep count of spaces.
Now imagine have a gig's worth of data (single file) in that shape that needs to be sorted.
The data is in a fixed width 80-column format.

Here is the sort command:

sort -y - n -k 2.2,2 -k 5.1,5 file.txt

What I am trying to do is sort on the first 13-digit number (absolute characters 8-20, inclusive) and then the last number, way off to the right (absolute characters 78-80, inclusive).

My sort command + arguments isn't doing what I want it to do. Can anyone spot the problem? It seems to be taking into consideration the Character before the 13-digit number. It doesn't really make sense.

Is there a way to sort, specifying keys by absolute position? Rather than worry about sort's interpretation of fields? Also, I wonder if there is a way to have sort show the user exactly what the keys are, as interpreted from the arguments. That might help the trouble shooting process.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

--jim

 

[Coderifous]

PS - there is really only 4 lines of data there, shorter lines should be joined with the larger lines preceding them.

--jim

 

[Coderifous]

OK - figured it out. N'ermind.

For the curious:

No one could have possibly helped me, becuase I didn't post enough notional data. Some of the records to not have a character in position 7. This throws off the idea of where the 'column' starts. I was assuming that the second character of the second column was always the first digit in the 13-digit number. This isn't the case when the 7-character is missing. That's what screwed up my sort. Solution:
use the -t arg and specify a separator that doesn't exist. That way the entire line is field one and I can specify fields by absolute position now.

Thanks to anyone that took the time,
--jim