Reordering Field durring Sort

[CaffeineGamer]

Hello,
This is going to sound like homework, because it is. I have been trying for a couple hours and cant figure it out, I have read every faq on sort.

I need to take a file formated as the following
first:last:city:state

sort it by last name

Display only the ones from a certain state and display it in this order

last:first:city:state

Normally I wouldn't post homework, but this is a project, and I am STUMPED! I have hit a brick wall in my script.


Any help is greatly appreciated.

[secondmouse]

Hints:
awk [ study it @ Awk - A Tutorial and Introduction - by Bruce Barnett ]
sort (since you have read the faqs about sort I believe you have ideas how to sort by specific column )

[egan]

Okay, to me this is really fun (I love Unix text processing). Here is a fairly easily-grasped way to do it, but it uses multiple programs. Sadly I don't have access to a "real" Operating System at this moment, so I am doing this by memory.

sed -n "/$STATE/p

This uses sed, the stream editor. You tell it not to print with -n, then you pass it its arguments, namely to print (p) lines containing $STATE. Obviously you would replace $STATE with the state you need to filter out.

As for the sorting by last name, you use sort for this (note: this might not work, as my knowledge is fuzzy here)

sort -t ":" +1

I believe that this tells sort to use : as a delimiter, and to sort by the second column.
Thus you would just pipe these two commands together and send it to some output.

[egan]

I'm sorry, I think the correct syntax is
sort -t : -k 2

To sort by the second column using : as the delimiter.