How to sort lines by float number

Question

I've such a file:

name: xxx --- time: 5.4 seconds
name: yyy --- time: 3.2 seconds
name: zzz --- time: 6.4 seconds
...

Now I want to sort this file by these float numbers to generate a new file as below:

name: yyy --- time: 3.2 seconds
name: xxx --- time: 5.4 seconds
name: zzz --- time: 6.4 seconds
...

I've tried the command awk '{print $5}' myfile | sort -g but this will show me ONLY the float numbers.

Answer 1

If using GNU sort or compatible, you can use its -g switch to do a general numeric sort:

$ sort -g -k5,5 file
name: yyy --- time: 3.2 seconds
name: xxx --- time: 5.4 seconds
name: zzz --- time: 6.4 seconds

The -k5,5 tells sort to perform the sort on just the 5th column.

Usage

Keep in mind the details from the info sort page:

'-g'
'--general-numeric-sort'
'--sort=general-numeric'
     Sort numerically, converting a prefix of each line to a long
     double-precision floating point number.  *Note Floating point::.
     Do not report overflow, underflow, or conversion errors.  Use the
     following collating sequence:

        * Lines that do not start with numbers (all considered to be
          equal).
        * NaNs ("Not a Number" values, in IEEE floating point
          arithmetic) in a consistent but machine-dependent order.
        * Minus infinity.
        * Finite numbers in ascending numeric order (with -0 and +0
          equal).
        * Plus infinity.

     Use this option only if there is no alternative; it is much slower
     than '--numeric-sort' ('-n') and it can lose information when
     converting to floating point.