On 19/11/14 04:21, Bradley Dean wrote: > Greetings, > > this is a question about a possible new command-line option for sort > that I'd be interested in implementing, but I thought I'd throw the idea > out there first before spending time on an idea that was not going to be > considered useful. I can't think of how I'd do this other than the way > I've put together below as an example of an existing workaround. > > When using sort to look at space-delimited data (ie with human-readable > columns) with a header row (or rows) it's useful to be able to keep the > header rows at the top/bottom of the data rather than having them end up > mixed with the data after sorting. > > It's often possible to do this by looking at the data twice (once to > grab the header, once to sort) - either by dumping to a file or by > running the generating command twice. > > For example - take some_command which outputs space-delimeted data with > 1 header row and a fourth numeric column I'd like to sort on: > > some_command > templog; head -1 templog; tail -n +2 templog | sort -n > -k 4 > > I think it would frequently be handy to be able to just ask sort to keep > the header rows aside - especially when doing things like running the > sort inside a "watch" loop where you'd like to be able to come back to > it over time and see what each column is.
This has been suggested before, though we're undecided on the need since there are ways to do this already, albeit a little awkward. Do any of the methods discussed here suffice? http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2013-01/msg00034.html thanks, Pádraig.
