sort : skipping "header" row(s) - possibile new command line option?

[Bradley Dean]

Greetings,

this is a question about a possible new command-line option for sort
that I'd be interested in implementing, but I thought I'd throw the idea
out there first before spending time on an idea that was not going to be
considered useful. I can't think of how I'd do this other than the way
I've put together below as an example of an existing workaround.

When using sort to look at space-delimited data (ie with human-readable
columns) with a header row (or rows) it's useful to be able to keep the
header rows at the top/bottom of the data rather than having them end up
mixed with the data after sorting.

It's often possible to do this by looking at the data twice (once to
grab the header, once to sort) - either by dumping to a file or by
running the generating command twice.

For example - take some_command which outputs space-delimeted data with
1 header row and a fourth numeric column I'd like to sort on:

  some_command > templog; head -1 templog; tail -n +2 templog | sort -n
  -k 4

I think it would frequently be handy to be able to just ask sort to keep
the header rows aside - especially when doing things like running the
sort inside a "watch" loop where you'd like to be able to come back to
it over time and see what each column is.

Cheerio,

 Brad

-- 
Bradley Dean
Email: address@hidden Skype: address@hidden
Mobile(Aus): +61-413014395 WWW: http://bjdean.id.au/