Re: sort --head

[Mark E. Shoulson]

Turns out whatever I'm doing doesn't work right when the input is a pipe 
(though input redirection from a file is okay), so in addition to being 
incomplete, this patch is actually buggy.  Will work on it, but still 
hoping to hear opinions.

~mark

On 6/18/24 21:49, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> Hi. New here, to post a patch which I hope will inspire someone to do 
> a better job.
>
> I can't really believe that for all these years, we still so very, 
> very often run sort(1) and pipe it through head(1) or tail(1), because 
> we only want the top/bottom 20 lines or whatever.  That means we're 
> sorting a potentially gigantic list of lines but not caring about most 
> of the information.
>
> I'm attaching a patch that adds `--head` and `--tail` options to 
> sort(1), so you say `sort --head=20` (which is equivalent to saying 
> `sort --tail=-20` and vice-versa).  I've worked this into sort(1) VERY 
> VERY BADLY, I'm sorry to say, but maybe someone with better 
> familiarity with the code can do it better.  Basically, I'm 
> special-casing out the situation when --head is active and doing my 
> own thing with it, and then lying to the rest of the program about 
> it.  But it works, anyway.