unix ksh shell scripts

Question

how to Sort a coma separated file (with following details) based on salary (ascending or descending) a.Ename,firstname,lastname,salary

Answer 1

sort -t, -k4,4 filename

That's for ascending, throw in -r for descending.

Answer 2

In my country the separator is not , but ; - so the solution is more complicated. Just in case this applies here too...:

LC_ALL=C 
export LC_ALL

and instead of -t, I use

--field-separator=\;