sort feature requests

[Balaji S. Srinivasan]

Hello,

The coreutils, particularly the text utilities, are an amazing piece  
of work and crucial for our group's research efforts at Stanford.
Thank you for taking the time to make this code robust and high quality.

Along these lines, I have a suggestion for a minor improvement. Would  
it be possible to add the following features to the next version of  
GNU sort?

1) Allow the first line of the input to be retained without sorting  
(e.g. to keep the header of a tab-delimited text file at the top of  
the file)
2) Allow the specification of tabs as separators with the -t option  
(this is useful when tab separated fields contain embedded spaces).  
Perhaps this is currently possible, but '\t' does not seem to work.

There are various ways to achieve this functionality by using shell  
scripts or complex pipelines, but it would be great if flags
enabling these features could be added to the next version.

Thanks again for all your efforts.

Sincerely,

Balaji Srinivasan

--
Balaji S. Srinivasan, Ph.D.
Stanford University
Lecturer, Depts. of Statistics and Computer Science
318 Campus Drive, Clark Center S251
(650) 380-0695
address@hidden
http://jinome.stanford.edu