Hi Pádraig, Thanks! Piping through ( sed -u 1q && sort ... ) works for me and is less typing than my example workaround.
Other than the non-portable issue (mentioned in your summary email in Jan 2013) it seems simple and short enough to be a good solution. Cheerio, Brad On Thu, 20 Nov 2014, at 00:57, Pádraig Brady wrote: > 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. -- Bradley Dean Email: [email protected] Skype: [email protected] Mobile(Aus): +61-413014395 WWW: http://bjdean.id.au/
