Re: [patch] add sort option for IP addresses

[Paul Eggert]

Norbert Kiesel wrote:
 
> I needed to sort some text by IP addresses, and there does not seem to
> be a good way to do it. They only trick I found was "-n -t. -k1,1 -k2,2
> -k3,3 -k4.4" or so, but that is kind of ugly.

The coreutils manual suggests:

sort -t '.' -k 1,1n -k 2,2n -k 3,3n -k 4,4n

It is a bit ugly, but it's fine for scripts.

Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> writes:

> For IPV4 this is too specific IMHO.

I tend to agree.  "sort" should have a way to plug in arbitrary
comparison functions.  For example, it might add an option to open a
pipe to another process, feed it two lines, and expect a response "<",
"=", ">".  Or perhaps there's a better way; but the point is that
these algorithms should not all have to be hardwired into "sort".

> You may have a point though for comparing IPV6 addresses.
> I can't figure out a general method at least.

Yes, it'd be tricky to reduce it to a -k recipe even if we added
support for comparing hexadecimal numbers to 'sort' (a far more likely
candidate for inclusion), because of mixed addresses and the ::
notation.  E.g., comparing 0:0:0:0:0:FFFF:129.144.52.38 to FF01::101
would be quite tricky with just -k and hex.

Better would be support for arbitrary comparison plugins.