Re: Enhancement Request: sort: skip table caption (or just a specified number of lines)

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

On 2020-11-05 10:23 a.m., Michael Mess wrote:
> I have a feature request for the sort command:
> I would like to sort a table but do not want to sort the column names a
> the top. Thus the column names or a specified number of lines should be
> just given out as they are, unsorted.
This has been discussed few times in the past,
please see discussion (and with further links to other relevant 
postings) at:
  https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=22057


> I know there is a workaround, but this is not so handy/comfortable
> and has other disadvantages:
>
> for a in ColumnName 4 2 3 1 ; do echo $a ;done | ( sed -u 1q ; sort
> -n )

As for handy/comfortable, you can use create a shell alias or a shell 
function, e.g.:

  $ alias sortcap="(sed -u q1 ; sort)"
  $ printf "%s\n" ColumnName 4 2 3 1 | sortcap
  ColumnName
  1
  2
  3
  4

But also (shameless plug), long ago I wrote a perl wrapper
for 'sort' that hides these details and accepts the same parameters as
'sort' with addition of "--header N" argument, similar to your requested 
"--caption".
https://github.com/agordon/bin_scripts/blob/master/scripts/sort-header.pl


Hope this helps.
 - Assaf