A common problem when sorting files stems from the file containing 1 or more header lines, which should not be sorted. As of now, the common solution to this problem is to remove the header lines with manually, or to output only the non header lines with tail, awk, or some other program and pipe the results to sort. This was likely not deemed a problem when sort was only single threaded, as the printing and pipe was likely still faster than the sort itself. However with multi-threaded sort this results in the operation bottle necking waiting for more information from the pipe. This common operation would be greatly improved if sort could simply print a user defined number of lines for each file. I have made a simple patch to implement this feature, which I have attached to this email.
sort_skip_lines.diff
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