Cut and Paste Commands

Question

So I have:

$ cat fruits
2 bananas
3 cherries
4 figs
5 dates
6 elderberries
7 apples
8 grapes

and

1 $ cat prices
2 2.18
3 4.11
4 1.69
5 4.52
6 1.73
7 1.01
8 1.09

Every line from 'fruits' corresponds with the same line from 'prices'. How I can sort the fruits in alphabetical order using cut `n paste, so that the 'prices' looks like or just prints out the following:

1 1.01
2 2.18
3 4.11
4 4.52
5 1.73
6 1.69
7 1.09

Solution

$ paste prices fruits | sort -k2 | cut -f1
1.01
2.18
4.11
4.52
1.73
1.69
1.09

paste combines the two files, line by line. sort -k2 sorts them on the second column (the fruit name). cut -f1 returns just the first column (the prices).

For the above, I assumed that the line numbers shown in the display of the fruits and prices files were an artifact of the display software and not part of the actual files.