On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, Josh Paetzel wrote:

> On Thursday, December 02, 2010 10:20:47 am Daniel Taylor wrote:
>> On 12/02/2010 12:03 AM, gregwm wrote:
>>> how do you tell sort to ignore the first x characters of each line and
>>> start the key at character x+1?
>>
>> That would be "sort -t'*' -k 1.9" if I understand it correctly.
>>
>> Replace '*' with something else if it might appear in the characters to
>> be skipped.
>
> -t isn't needed in this case.  sort -k 1.x, where x is the character 
> position you want to sort on, counting from 1.

Right.  I should have looked at "info sort" instead of "man sort" because 
the use of "." gets a lot more attention there.  I forgot all about it.


> You might want to check how it behaves if you have lines starting with
> whitespace, that's the edge case that might blow it up.  Another edge case
> would be if you sort on character 4 and have a 3 character word followed by a
> space.  Not sure how it would react to that.

I think sort -k1.x handles everything pretty well.  Good to know.  When 
there are initial spaces, it treats them as characters in the first field. 
When lines are shorter than x characters, they get sorted first (so 
"nothing" sorts before other characters).  Spaces are handled like other 
characters.  In short, it seems to do exactly what was requested.

Mike