AWK is it possible to read a time field and use it for sorting?

Question

I have two files and I need to sort and merge the rows based on the time column:

File A:

"2014-02-26 16:03:04"   "Login Success|isNoSession=false"   id=csr,ou=user,dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org    7efb2f0e035a0e3d01  10.17.174.30    INFO    dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org   "cn=dsameuser,ou=DSAME Users,dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org" AUTHENTICATION-100  DataStore   "Not Available" 10.17.174.30

File B:

"2014-02-26 16:02:27"   "Login Failed"  dennis  "Not Available" 10.17.174.30    INFO    dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org   "cn=dsameuser,ou=DSAME Users,dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org" AUTHENTICATION-200  DataStore   "Not Available" 10.17.174.30    
"2014-02-26 16:02:37"   "Login Failed"  purva   "Not Available" 10.17.174.30    INFO    dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org   "cn=dsameuser,ou=DSAME Users,dc=openam,dc=forgerock,dc=org" AUTHENTICATION-200  DataStore   "Not Available" 10.17.174.30

I need to merge the files (pretty standard) but I have to insert the rows into final file based on time found in column 1. I have several other items to modify for each line but I'm pretty sure I can figure that out. The sorting based on time column has me stumped.

So in this case I would have a file with the line from File A at the end.

Other details.

Just to refresh myself on gawk I was working on parsing the first file. Here is what I have so far:

#!/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {
    FS="\t";
}
{
    # if we have more than 12 fields for the current row, proceed
    if ( NF > 12 )
    {
        # start looking for the user name
        n = split( $3, var1, ",");
        if (n > 4)
        {
            n2 = split (var1[1], var2, "=");
            if (n2 >= 2)
            {
                # Ignore any line where we do not have "id=xxxxx,..."
                if (var2[1] == "id")
                {
                    print $1, "N/A", "N/A", $12, $5, $5, var2[2]
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
END {
    print "Total Number of records=" NR
}

I probably need to move that into a function to make it easier since I'm going to be processing two files at the same time.

Answer 1

Based in the linux and bash tags, you can concatenate both files, sort them by first field and then apply your awk command to the result:

cat fileA fileB | sort -t$'\t' -s -k1,1 | awk -f script.awk