Hal PomeranzHow about another date-based trivia question? This time you have a text file where the first field is a date in the American style "MM/DD/YYYY" format (let me apologize to the rest of the world for what can only be described as a terrible mistake). How do you sort the lines in the file by date without changing the text on each line?
Yesterday's Linux DFIR command line trivia asked how to sort lines of a text file on an initial date field in the American date style, "MM/DD/YYYY", without rewriting the line.
Shout out to @mish for checking in with a solution to leverage the ability to sort on fields:
sort -t/ -n -k3,3 -k1,1 -k2,2 input.txt
"-t/" means break up the fields on "/" characters rather than spaces, and "-n" means we're going to sort numerically rather than alphabetically. "-k" lets us specify the "key fields" we want to sort on: year first, then month, then day.
Yay for "sort"!
boringsoylatte