AWK sort array

GAWK provides asort and asorti functions to sort arrays, but it is not useful in sorting arraying while wanting to keep the relationship between the index and the value. Here are two functions, zsort and zsorti, that do this.

Here is the code

#!/bin/gawk -f
function zsort(a,b){
 count=0;
 delete b;
  sort= "LC_ALL=C sort -k2nr -t,"
  for (i in a){
   printf("%s,%s\n",i,a[i]) |& sort;
  }
  close(sort, "to")
  while ((sort |& getline line) > 0){
   split(line,x,",");
  count++;
  b[count,1]=x[1];
  b[count,2]=x[2];
 }
 close(sort)
 return  count;
}
function zsorti(a,b){
 count =0;
 delete b;
  sort= "LC_ALL=C sort -k1nr -t,"
  for (i in a){
   printf("%s,%s\n",i,a[i]) |& sort;
  }
  close(sort, "to")
  while ((sort |& getline line) > 0){
   split(line,x,",");
  count++;
  b[count,1]=x[1];
  b[count,2]=x[2];
 }
 close(sort)
 return  count;
}
BEGIN{
 a["x"]=5; a["y"]=7; a["z"]=6; a["a"]=10;

# sort by the array value
 num=zsort(a,b);
 for (i=1;i<=num;i++){
  printf("%s,%s\n",b[i,1],b[i,2]);
 }
 print "==============="
# sort by the array index
 num=zsorti(a,b);
 for (i=1;i<=num;i++){
  printf("%s,%s\n",b[i,1],b[i,2]);
 }
}

Here is the result:

a,10
y,7
z,6
x,5
===============
a,10
x,5
y,7
z,6