Feature suggestion: sort --skip-header-lines=N (and perhaps --skip-trailer-lines?)

[Annihilannic]

Hi,

I find that I frequently need to sort the tabular output of a command 
that includes heading lines, so often that I've written my own wrapper 
'sorthead <n> <sort options>'.  In other words, preserve the position of 
the specified number of lines of input data.

I think this would be a generally useful feature to add to the sort 
command, with a syntax similar to --skip-header-lines=N.  Has it been 
considered and discarded before?  A cursory search of this mailing list 
did not turn up any prior discussions.

Handling trailing lines in a similar way could also be useful.

Regards,

Scott