Sort Text Blocks

I recently came across a simple task, wherein i had to sort a massive text file which was an output of a heavy data crunching code. In pursuit of the short and easy way to do a block sort on each text blocks separated by a new line character, the first think that appeared to me for solving this was indeed BASH.

The output of the program was something like: “

Block-1

… …

Block-2

… …

Block-N

… … Had to sort each block, the advantage was that it was separated by a new line. The below is what i did in BASH and awk to solve the problem.

BASH version:

buffer=; 
{ while read -r; 
do if [[ $REPLY ]]; then
      buffer+="$REPLY"$'\n'; 
   else 
      sort <<<"$buffer"; 
      buffer=; 
   fi; 
done; sort <<<"$buffer"; } < unsorted > sorted

The code is a simple play and sheer power of bash redirections. The read -r does not allow backslashes to escape any characters.