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Re: sort by last column with key=-1
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: sort by last column with key=-1 |
Date: |
Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:28:01 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
Remko Bolt <address@hidden> writes:
> Would you consider supporting negative keys to facilitate sorting by the last
> column with --key=-1?
That makes sense to me, yes. I suppose key 0 could be the entire
line, so key -0 would be equivalent to key 0.
One other idle thought: currently 'sort -k 9999999999999999999999999999'
complains, but there's no real reason for it to complain; it could
just silently ignore the key. Even if infinite-precision arithmetic
were supported that key can't possibly contribute to the comparison,
since the input record can't possibly contain that many keys due to
size_t limitations.