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Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length
From: |
Jim Meyering |
Subject: |
Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length |
Date: |
Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:12:46 +0200 |
Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Ethan Baldridge wrote:
>> I had a list to sort at work today that needed to be in the format "A B
>> C D E... AA BB CC DD" but sort(1) only returns results as "A AA B BB C
>> CC".
>>
>>
>>
>> So I wrote a patch to add -length-sort as an option. (-l was not taken
>> as a short option so I added that too).
>>
>>
>>
>> Here it is attached as a unified diff. I tested it and it seems to work
>> naturally in conjunction with other operands, so I don't believe there
>> are likely to be problems.
>
> Thanks for doing that!
> I'm not sure that it belongs in sort though as it's quite specialized.
> Also there is ambiguity in the length of a line.
> I.E. is it bytes, characters or screen cells.
>
> Also it's quite easy to achieve with existing tools:
> awk '{print length, $0}' <file | sort -n | cut -f2- -d' '
IMHO, this is a decisive argument for not adding the option.
However, I would welcome a paragraph documenting the technique as
an example of how to extend sort.
> What might be better would be to add an option
> to `wc` to get it to prepend various counts to a line
> (words, chars, bytes, cells), which then could be
> sorted and stripped as above.
This is tempting, but I am reluctant to modify wc in this manner.
wc is a fundamental tool, and adding a feature like this would
seem to bring too little value for the impact on the code.
It's easier to say "just use ___" (perl, awk, etc).
- New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, (continued)
- New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Ethan Baldridge, 2009/07/16
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Pádraig Brady, 2009/07/17
- RE: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Ethan Baldridge, 2009/07/17
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Pádraig Brady, 2009/07/20
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Erik Auerswald, 2009/07/20
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Ethan Baldridge, 2009/07/23
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Pádraig Brady, 2009/07/23
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length,
Jim Meyering <=
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Pádraig Brady, 2009/07/24
- Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length, Ethan Baldridge, 2009/07/24
- [PATCH] doc: add a sort by line length example to sort info, Pádraig Brady, 2009/07/24
- Re: [PATCH] doc: add a sort by line length example to sort info, Jim Meyering, 2009/07/25