Turns out whatever I'm doing doesn't work right when the input is a pipe
(though input redirection from a file is okay), so in addition to being
incomplete, this patch is actually buggy. Will work on it, but still
hoping to hear opinions.
~mark
On 6/18/24 21:49, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
Hi. New here, to post a patch which I hope will inspire someone to do
a better job.
I can't really believe that for all these years, we still so very,
very often run sort(1) and pipe it through head(1) or tail(1), because
we only want the top/bottom 20 lines or whatever. That means we're
sorting a potentially gigantic list of lines but not caring about most
of the information.
I'm attaching a patch that adds `--head` and `--tail` options to
sort(1), so you say `sort --head=20` (which is equivalent to saying
`sort --tail=-20` and vice-versa). I've worked this into sort(1) VERY
VERY BADLY, I'm sorry to say, but maybe someone with better
familiarity with the code can do it better. Basically, I'm
special-casing out the situation when --head is active and doing my
own thing with it, and then lying to the rest of the program about
it. But it works, anyway.
