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

[Bradley Dean]

Hi Pádraig,

Thanks! Piping through ( sed -u 1q && sort ... ) works for me and is
less typing than my example workaround.

Other than the non-portable issue (mentioned in your summary email in
Jan 2013) it seems simple and short enough to be a good solution.

Cheerio,

 Brad
 

On Thu, 20 Nov 2014, at 00:57, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 19/11/14 04:21, Bradley Dean wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> This has been suggested before, though we're undecided on the need
> since there are ways to do this already, albeit a little awkward.
> Do any of the methods discussed here suffice?
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2013-01/msg00034.html
> 
> thanks,
> Pádraig.


-- 
Bradley Dean
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