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I need to sort a file by multiple columns. There are 12 columns and I need to sort first by column 2, then 11, and lastly 3. The third column should be in reverse order (highest to lowest values). I also want to save the sorted columns to a new document. This is the command I'm using but it's not working:

sort -k 2,2 Filename | sort -k 11,11 | sort -k 3,3 -r -o test_sorting.txt

What should I do differently?

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    Have you tried just using sort once? Sort -k ... -k ... etc. Otherwise it's ignoring any previous sorting earlier in the pipe, maybe
    – Guy
    Dec 21, 2016 at 21:58

1 Answer 1

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You can chain keys in the same command, it will sort in the order specified.

sort -o test_sorting.txt -k 2,2 -k 11,11 -k 3,3r Filename
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