I have a file that I want to sort from the nth column (which is numeric) - not the nth field.  The file looks schematically like:1 Here are four words       9 8 5 2 Here's two                7 2 63 One 2 3                  10 3 74 Guess how many are here   9 4 8123456789012345678901234567890123(where the last line is just a counter for clarity).  The good folk at stackexchange showed me that i need something like sort -k1.27, which almost does what i want.  However, where there are ties initially (as in lines 1 and 4 above;  both 9), sort falls back to the start of the field, ranking line 1 before line 4 in this case (because 1 comes before 4); whereas what i need is a sort starting at field 1.27 (i.e., one that ranks 9 4 before 9 8).I've tried sort -g -k1.27,1.34 [and sort -g -k1.27,34] but the extra argument has no evident effect...any ideas?
sorting on two vertical columns
text processing;sort