Sorting by two columns

Question

Write a shell script named sales1 using nawk and sort commands to do the following:
1. print the file in two sections, east and west, with lines alphabetized by last name within each section, showing per quarter and total sales per person.
2. print the names of sales people in three groups:
"The following people had total sales greater than $270:"
"The following people had total sales between $250 and $270:"
"The following people had total sales less than $250:"

east:Sam Smith:52:72:78:62  
east:Daniel Liebelt:83:78:84:61  
east:Shirley Couts:66:57:67:37  
east:James Peringer:50:62:56:94  
east:Lilly Batsuro:58:85:84:52  
west:Alex Opitz:79:68:57:93  
west:Carmen Gondar:62:58:85:56  
west:Derek Willard:63:69:74:43  
west:Kim Husak:89:91:63:64  
west:Lenny Taufa:53:61:82:52

I only need assistance with # 1...

I've tried

sort -k1,1 -k2,2

But it only sorts it by east then west and not by the last name. I'm trying to treat the first column as the direction and first name and the second column as the last name with the numbers...

Answer 1

With awk you could prepend : to the last field (that is, last name plus everything that follows) sort by 1st and 3rd fields (this time using : as a field delimiter) then again with awk remove the first : from the last field :

awk '$NF=":"$NF' infile | sort -t : -k1,1 -k3,3 | awk 'sub(/:/, "", $NF)'

end result:

east:Lilly Batsuro:58:85:84:52
east:Shirley Couts:66:57:67:37
east:Daniel Liebelt:83:78:84:61
east:James Peringer:50:62:56:94
east:Sam Smith:52:72:78:62
west:Carmen Gondar:62:58:85:56
west:Kim Husak:89:91:63:64
west:Alex Opitz:79:68:57:93
west:Lenny Taufa:53:61:82:52
west:Derek Willard:63:69:74:43

Answer 2

sed -r 's/^([^:]+):([^ ]+) ([^:]+):.*$/\1-\3 &/' your-file.txt  | \
    sort | sed -r 's/[^ ]+ (.*)/\1/'

Example:

$ sed -r 's/^([^:]+):([^ ]+) ([^:]+):.*$/\1-\3 &/' your-file.txt  | sort | sed -r 's/[^ ]+ (.*)/\1/'
east:Lilly Batsuro:58:85:84:52
east:Shirley Couts:66:57:67:37
east:Daniel Liebelt:83:78:84:61
east:James Peringer:50:62:56:94
east:Sam Smith:52:72:78:62
west:Carmen Gondar:62:58:85:56
west:Kim Husak:89:91:63:64
west:Alex Opitz:79:68:57:93
west:Lenny Taufa:53:61:82:52
west:Derek Willard:63:69:74:43

By the way, this is how sort selects the first field and the second field when you run it with sort -k1,1 -k2,2:

$ sort --debug -k1,1 -k2,2 ttt.txt
east:Daniel Liebelt:83:78:84:61
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east:James Peringer:50:62:56:94
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east:Lilly Batsuro:58:85:84:52
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          ____________________
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east:Sam Smith:52:72:78:62
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east:Shirley Couts:66:57:67:37
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            __________________
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west:Alex Opitz:79:68:57:93
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         __________________
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west:Carmen Gondar:62:58:85:56
___________
           ___________________
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west:Derek Willard:63:69:74:43
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          ____________________
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west:Kim Husak:89:91:63:64
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        __________________
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west:Lenny Taufa:53:61:82:52
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          __________________