Alphanumeric sorting of a string with variable width size

Question

I am stuck in a small sorting step. I have a huge file with >300K entries and the file has to be sorted on a specific column containing alphanumeric identifiers as

Rpl12-8
Lrsam1-1
Rpl12-9
Lrsam1-2
Rpl12-10
Lrsam1-5
Rpl12-11
Lrsam1-101
Lrsam2-1
Act-1
Act-100
Act-101
Act-11

The problem is the variable width size, so I am unable to specify the second key identifier (sort -k 1.8n).The first sort is on first alphabet, then on number next to it and then the third number after "-". Can I specifically enable sorting after "-" using delimiter field so then I don't care about width of string.

Desired output would be :

Act-1
Act-11
Act-100
Act-101
Lrsam1-1
Lrsam1-2
Lrsam1-5
Lrsam1-101
Lrsam2-1
Rpl12-8
Rpl12-9
Rpl12-10
Rpl12-11

Answer 1

With the above data in input.txt:

sort -t- -k1,1 -k2n input.txt

You can change the field delimiter to - with -t, then sort on the first field only (as a string) with -k1,1, and finally the 2nd field (as a number) with -k2n.