[SOLVED] Sort pairs alphabetically in Bash

Issue

I have a file with the following data in it:

adam
humanities

castiel
sciences

antwon
sciences

dmitri
informatics

zoe
mathematics

bernard
economics

I want to be able to sort the file w.r.t the names of the people so that the output looks like so:

adam
humanities

antwon
sciences

bernard
economics

castiel
sciences

dmitri
informatics

zoe
mathematics

cat filename | sort sorts all the data including the subjects. How do I sort it with the names of people?

Solution

Using asorti in awk to sort the array of data

awk '{a[$1]=$2} END {n=asorti(a,c);for (i=1;i<=n;i++) print c[i] "\n" a[c[i]] "\n"}' RS= file
adam
humanities

antwon
sciences

bernard
economics

castiel
sciences

dmitri
informatics

zoe
mathematics

If your awk does not have asorti, try this:

awk '{print $1,$2}' RS="" file | sort | awk '{print $1 "\n" $2 "\n"}'

Answered By - Jotne

Answer Checked By - Mildred Charles (WPSolving Admin)