Awk and sort (of text files)

[jd1008]

On 06/28/2015 07:02 PM, Stephen Davies wrote:
>
> On 29/06/15 10:13, jd1008 wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 06/28/2015 06:38 PM, jd1008 wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I have text files made of paragraphs of text, separated by
>>> blank lines.
>>>
>>> Each "paragraph" is information about a different item.
>>>
>>> In need to sort these paragraphs based on the first line
>>> of each paragraph.
>>>
>>> Need some hints how to accomplish this.
>>>
>>> Thanx.
>> Forgot to say that each paragraph is made of multiple lines,
>> but a paragraph's lines do not contain a blank line.
> I would just concatenate lines until the blank is reached then write 
> out the concatenated line.
> The result can then be sorted.
>
> If you want to revert the result to paragraphs, just reverse the 
> process outputting lines of up to N characters ending in a space.
>
> HTH,
> Stephen
>
Too much work to break the one line back into multiple lines because the 
lines are of different lengths.
Too many files also. Also, to keep original lines of a paragraph 
unmangled, I would have to first
do something like append each line of a paragraph with a delineating 
character to be used by something
like sed to change that character into a newline.