没有标题的数据的Powershell排序对象

Question

Is there a way in PowerShell to sort data that does not have a header. I cannot use | sort-object dateViewed | sort-object dateViewed because my data does not contain a header. I could use a script to create a new object with a header, but is there a way to sort by the 3rd column?

If I have a cli API aws get-vols that returns data like:

disk00   123456  20180103

disk00   222222  20180101

disk00   333333  20180102

I'm looking for the easy way out.

aws get-vols | sort-object (specify something that means column 3)

And i would see:

disk00   222222  20180101

disk00   333333  20180102

disk00   123456  20180103

Answer 1

You might be better off using the AWS PowerShell module instead, which probably returns a real object.

But to answer your question, I will assume the return from aws get-vols is a bunch of separate lines, which are really just strings, where each "column" is separated by a TAB .

In that case, treat it like a CSV with a special delimiter:

aws get-vols |
    ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter "`t" -Header Disk,Id,DateViewed |
    Sort-Object -Property DateViewed

You can use the same approach if the separator is multiple spaces instead of tab, it's just a little more annoying:

aws get-vols |
    ForEach-Object -Process {
        # replace all contiguous whitespace with a comma
        # hope you don't have column values with spaces ;)

        $_ -replace '\s+', ','  
    } |
    ConvertFrom-Csv -Header Disk,Id,DateViewed |
    Sort-Object -Property DateViewed

Answer 2

If you have PowerShell 5.0 or newer, you should be able to say something like this with the ConvertFrom-String cmdlet :

aws get-vols | ConvertFrom-String | Sort-Object P3

But I agree with briantist that if there are cmdlets you should use those instead of parsing text.