Re: New sort(1) feature -- sort by length

[Eric Blake]

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According to Ethan Baldridge on 7/16/2009 3:06 PM:
> I had a list to sort at work today that needed to be in the format "A B
> C D E... AA BB CC DD" but sort(1) only returns results as "A AA B BB C
> CC".

Thanks for the ideas; it is especially nice when ideas are accompanied by
a patch.  However,...

sort is already quite powerful.  I'm not sure we need a new command line
option unless we can prove there is no way to do what you want with the
existing options.  Taking your example, here's a length-based sort:

$ echo A B C D E AA BB CC DD EE | tr ' ' '\n' | sort -k1,1.1 -k1,1.2
A
AA
B
BB
C
CC
D
DD
E
EE

> 
> Here it is attached as a unified diff. I tested it and it seems to work
> naturally in conjunction with other operands, so I don't believe there
> are likely to be problems.

The HACKING file gives more ideas on how best to contribute a patch; we
prefer patches against the latest git sources, rather than the last release.
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/HACKING

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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