Sort a list but have 2 specific objects at the top

PowerShell Help
1

How can I sort a list but add a specific item to the top? For example:
apple
orange
peach
pear
grapefruit

Let’s say I want to sort the list alphabetically but I want peach up top and I only want it to appear once. I would also like Grapefruit to be 2nd. Thanks in advance!

2

Yeah, pasting didn’t work :). Try the TEXT tab if you want to paste.

3

Thank you Don! Lesson learned don’t paste in the forums unless I’m on the text tab.

I tried to go back and edit it but the forums stared giving me a 401 error around that time. I hope I did not cause that.

Anyway as far as a real world example I am trying to write a script that sets the binding order for all of the network interfaces on Hyper-V hypervisors. I have everything working now I just need to be able to sort the NICs. So the real lines look something like this. . .

\Device{29CAAE8F-A8B2-4849-BD82-CFD84E676DCF}
\Device{0E72F113-A4E3-4201-B9E2-3EB9C6C8582D}

-VERN

4

There’d be no easy way to do this. You’d probably pipe your list to Sort-Object first, and grab that in a variable. Then you’d have to construct a new array, adding objects to it in whatever order you want, and then output that array. There’s not really a more elegant approach.

5

I think I got it. . .

Put the 2 I want on top of a temp file

“peach” | Out-File .\step2.txt -Force
“grapefruit” | Out-File .\step2.txt -Append

Get the list I can’t control and append it after my top 2

Get-Content .\unsorted.txt | Sort-Object | Out-File .\step2.txt -Append

Sort the temp file and exclude duplicates

Get-Content .\step2.txt | Select-Object -Unique

I promise Don Jones I will learn to work with arrays that have carriage returns in them

Currently I only know comma separated arrays

6

I’d be happy to have ya putting stuff in variables instead of in files as an interim holding area ;).

So, a couple of things: Arrays don’t “have” commas or carriage returns. An array is (basically) a collection of objects. PowerShell interprets comma-separated lists as arrays ($array = 1,2,3) and when it reads a file, it uses newline (CRLF) characters to return each line of the file as an object - meaning the entire file is interpreted as an array of strings.

So if I had things at the top in $topmost ($topmost = ‘peach’,‘plum’), and I had other objects in $main ($main = ‘apple’,‘pear’,‘mango’), I would probably do:

$sorted_main = $main | sort-object
$topmost,sorted_main | select -unique

As a quick way to get my list.

7

Thanks Don,

Looking forward to the podcast tonight for sure. OK so here we go I think I learned something here. . .

$topmost = ‘peach’,‘grapefruit’
$main = ‘apple’,‘orange’,‘peach’,‘pear’,‘grapefruit’
$sorted_main = $main | Sort-Object
$topmost+$sorted_main | Select-Object -unique

In my real word array of strings the duplicates are going to be there so I joined (+) topmost and sorted main so I could filter out the duplicates. The variable we are calling “main” is a list of objects from a registry key I can not predict or control and the 2 objects I want sorted to the top are already in there. So I like this and I think you have helped me greatly and now I don’t have to rely on saving to a file and getting content out of a file to sort my list and what I posted above works exactly like I need. Thanks again this is awesome!

-VERN