How can I sort the output of awk, disregarding a certain character?

Question

I am trying to print out the Chinese font I have in my laptop, and sort the output with respect to their name that could be referred to in LaTeX. This could be done with the following command:

fc-list :lang=zh-cn | awk -F": " '{$1=""; print}' | sort

It finds the font list, then after first occurrence of : and a single space, which is where the names of the font show up. Then we of course sort it.

The problem here is though, there are fonts named like .PingFang SC, which is sorted to the very front and is not that consistent with the rest. Is there a way to sort disregarding the period?

It may not be a good choice to remove the period, which will change the actual name of the font and thus make the reference hard.

Answer 1

Try using sort -d (“dictionary order”, which seems to ignore non-alpha characters):

$ printf "Orange\n.PingFang\nRed\n" | sort
.PingFang
Orange
Red

$ printf "Orange\n.PingFang\nRed\n" | sort -d
Orange
.PingFang
Red