Recently I needed to sort a file of entries by the date in each entry, where the date was a human-readable string across a few whitespace breaks. The format of each line was like this:
1 | ENTRY-0009 FAIL Thu Sep 5 17:39:24 2019 PASS 7 FAIL 6
|
But the most obvious sort command
sort entries.txt -k7 -k4M -k5 -k6
didn't produce results sorted in the expected order (2019, Sep [month], 5, 17:39:24). Let me show you after the break: