On Tue, 09 May 2023 16:46:26 -0400, Martin Τrautmann <t-usenet@gmx.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 May 2023 14:41:33 -0400, David W. Hodgins wrote:
>> Easy to check as I use leafnode. :-)
>>
>> # grep ^'Subject:' /var/spool/news/comp/unix/shell/*|grep 'sort by multiple columns'|wc -l
>> 85
>
> But the result would not have been sorted properly yet. Maybe you could
> use sort to sort the digits suitably first, then use awk to compute the
> correct checksum?

:-)

Regards, Dave Hodgins

Janis Papanagnou wrote:

> On 09.05.2023 19:41, Martin Τrautmann wrote:
>> On Tue, 09 May 2023 10:54:09 -0400, Benjamin Esham wrote:
>>> Ah, I think I understand. What you are calling the "first" sort is the
>>> "innermost" sort, i.e., the sort that is applied *last*, and only if it is
>>> necessary to break the tie between two rows that have been considered equal
>>> by all of the previous sorting steps.
>>
>> Yeah, that's it. And the proper sort command had been given before:
>>
>> sort -t\; -k4,4n -k2,2 -k3,3
>
> In that light it's interesting how long (in time and number of posts)
> this thread got. ;-)

Partly my fault, sorry everyone :-) I was catching up with the newsgroup
after a while and missed that the "right answer" had already been posted.

Benjamin