Re: sort by last column with key=-1

[Paul Eggert]

Remko Bolt <address@hidden> writes:

> Would you consider supporting negative keys to facilitate sorting by the last
> column with --key=-1?

That makes sense to me, yes.  I suppose key 0 could be the entire
line, so key -0 would be equivalent to key 0.

One other idle thought: currently 'sort -k 9999999999999999999999999999'
complains, but there's no real reason for it to complain; it could
just silently ignore the key.  Even if infinite-precision arithmetic
were supported that key can't possibly contribute to the comparison,
since the input record can't possibly contain that many keys due to
size_t limitations.