How to sort by date in descending order

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 12:59 +0100, Richard Cahilig wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Guys I need your help, I have a text file which contains these data
> below, and I want to sort it by date in descending order. I tried to
> use sort -rn command but it gives me different output.

You just told it to sort in reverse numerical order. You can't directly
do what you want with 'sort' as it has no concept of date order. However
it does a concept of 'month', so you might be able to run a pipeline of
several calls to sort, first by year, then by month and finally by day.
Left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Or look around for some Perl script which no doubt has already been
written. Google is your friend.

poc