Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length

[Pádraig Brady]

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' '

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.

cheers,
Pádraig.