How to sort, preserving position of blank lines

Question

I have a data looks like this ``` |201451| |201441| |201431| |201421| ``` I have to sort it to ``` |201421| |201431| |201441| |201451| ``` I have tried using both these: ``` sort -t"|" -k4.5,4.6 -b data LC_ALL=c sort -t"|" -k4.5,4.6 -b data ``` but it always gives me ``` |201421| |201431| |201441| |201451| ``` I want to maintain the space with the sorted value. How do I do so?? Basically I have to ignore the line space and not remove them...

Accepted Answer

Try to execute:

```
sort -t"|" -k4.5,4.6 data | grep -v "^$" | awk '{print $0"
"}'
```

How to sort, preserving position of blank lines

Solution

Problem