Shell Programming Question - sort

Larry Wall lwall at jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV
Thu Mar 8 12:42:18 AEST 1990


In article <3190 at hcx1.SSD.CSD.HARRIS.COM> brad at SSD.CSD.HARRIS.COM (Brad Appleton) writes:
: I believe that BSD Unix should have a command called "reverse" which
: reverses the characters in each line of a file. Run your file through
: reverse, then sort, then back through reverse (this may not work 
: depending upon how fancy a sort you need to do).
: 
: 	reverse file | sort [options] | reverse [-] > outfile

Kinda hard to sort on a numeric field that way tho, which I think he
wanted...

: Just in case you dont have reverse... It is easy to write!

It's even easier than a 97 line C program:

    perl -ne 'chop; print reverse "\n", split(//);'

But probably not as efficient.  Especially if you include the time to
install perl.   :-)

Larry Wall
lwall at jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov



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