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

[Pádraig Brady]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>
>> 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.

I'll mention the DSU idiom in the info docs,
with this as an example.

>> 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).

Having it in wc would allow one to easily count chars, bytes, cells.
But I agree it's not needed often enough to add.

cheers,
Pádraig.