Bash: sort rows within a file by timestamp - bash

Question

I am new to bash scripting and I have written a script to match regex and output lines to print to a file.
However, each line contains multiple columns, one of which is the timestamp column, which appears in the form YYYYMMDDHHMMSSTTT (to millisecond) as shown below.
20180301050630663,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630664,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630665,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630666,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630667,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630668,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630663,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630665,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630661,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630662,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
My code is written as follow:
awk -F "," -v OFS=","'{if($2=="ABC"){print}}' < $i>> "$filename"
How can I modify my code such that it can sort the rows by timestamp (YYYYMMDDHHMMSSTTT) in ascending order before printing to file?

Answer 1

You can use a very simple sort command, e.g.
sort yourfile
If you want to insure sort only looks at the datestamp, you can tell sort to only use the first command separated field as your sorting criteria, e.g.
sort -t, -k1 yourfile
Example Use/Output
With your data save in a file named log, you could do:
$ sort -t, -k1 log
20180301050630661,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630662,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630663,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630663,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630664,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630665,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630665,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630666,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630667,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
20180301050630668,ABC,,,,,,,,,,
Let me know if you have any problems.

Answer 2

Just add a pipeline.
awk -F "," '$2=="ABC"' < "$i" |
sort -n >> "$filename"
In the general case, to sort on column 234. try sort -t, -k234,234n
Notice alse the quoting around "$i", like you already have around "$filename", and the simplifications of the Awk script.

Answer 3

If you are using gawk you can do:
$ awk -F "," -v OFS="," '$2=="ABC"{a[$1]=$0} # Filter lines that have "ABC"
END{ # set the sort method
PROCINFO["sorted_in"] = "#ind_num_asc"
for (e in a) print a[e] # traverse the array of lines
}' file
An alternative is to use sed and sort:
sed -n '/^[0-9]*,ABC,/p' file | sort -t, -k1 -n
Keep in mind that both of these methods are unrelated to the shell used. Bash is just executing the tools (sed, awk, sort, etc) that are otherwise part of the OS.
Bash itself could do the sort in pure Bash but it would be long and slow.