UNIX® Shells by Example, Third Edition

7.3. Pipes

If you open a pipe in an awk program, you must close it before opening another one. The command on the right-hand side of the pipe symbol is enclosed in double quotes. Only one pipe can be open at a time.

Example 7.16.

(The Database) % cat names john smith alice cheba george goldberg susan goldberg tony tram barbara nguyen elizabeth lone dan savage eliza goldberg john goldenrod (The Command Line) % nawk '{print $1, $2 | "sort –r +1 –2 +0 –1 "}' names (The Output) tony tram john smith dan savage barbara nguyen elizabeth lone john goldenrod susan goldberg george goldberg eliza goldberg alice cheba

EXPLANATION Awk will pipe the output of the print statement as input to the UNIX sort command, which does a reversed sort using the second ...