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

[Pádraig Brady]

Erik Auerswald wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 01:54:18PM +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> Ethan Baldridge wrote:
>>> I'd argue on terms of obviousness: "I'm trying to sort these differently...
>>> I should look at the options for sort!"
>> Well lots of things boil down to sorting so I think we've to be especially
>> careful with adding things to `sort`. While your suggestion is useful
>> and is simple to implement I'm worried that it's not needed often enough
>> to allocate a sort option for it. Also it's easy enough to achieve with
>> a little sed & awk around the sort even for the single field case.
> 
> IMHO the "little awk & sed" needed clearly shows the superiority of a
> sort option to use the already existing key length for sorting.

I'm not really debating the best way to sort by length.
I'm wondering how often this is required having never
needed it myself. I.E. there are many possible sort types
one could add to sort, so it's worth debating and showing
concrete examples of where new types are useful.

cheers,
Pádraig.