Re: [patch] add sort option for IP addresses

[Matthew Woehlke]

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.  So I hacked together a
> patch that adds -I,--ipaddess-sort to sort.  It's still incomplete (no
> IPv6, no manual, possibly configure.in checks needed), but I would work
> on this if there is a chance that the patch will get added.
>
> Comments?

A while back, I posted an RFC [1] about adding "recursive numeric sort" 
and numeric sort with an arbitrary base. Assuming you want:

10.10.10.1
10.10.10.2
10.10.11.255
127.0.0.1
192.12.12.0
192.14.16.2

...etc, then recursive should work, and recursive plus base=16 should 
work for e.g. MAC addresses (and fully-qualified IPv6 addresses, but not 
shortened ones e.g. 2001:db8::1428:57ab unless they are all shortened in 
the same place). The consensus there seemed positive on the coreutils 
side but less optimistic about my end of copyright assignment. IOW if 
you want to implement my RFC and can handle assignment, it sounded like 
it would be accepted (and I would be happy to offer whatever assistance 
won't get me entangled in copyright problems).

Also, you should work against at minimum the latest stable release 
(6.6), if not CVS. Working against 5.97 you are likely to run into 
conflicts.

1: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-11/msg00020.html

--
Matthew
This message will self destruct in five millennia.