Unix sort except the first line

Mar 3, 2014 2 min read

Originally published on my old Blogger blog on March 3, 2014. Read the original post and its comments.

Many times I have a file with a header needs to be sorted, but I do not want to sort the header.
I saw it on Twitter:

razor ‏@razZ0r Mar 1
todays fav linux oneliner: command | (read -r; printf "%s\n" "$REPLY"; sort) > output sort everything except first line.

REPLY is the default variable for the read command.

one more general use of the "body" function
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9281449/unix-skip-header-bash-function
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11856/sort-but-keep-header-line-in-the-at-the-top

# print the header (the first line of input)
# and then run the specified command on the body (the rest of the input)
# use it in a pipeline, e.g. ps | body grep somepattern
body() {
    IFS= read -r header
    printf '%s\n' "$header"
    "$@"
}

IFS is the bash Shell Bourne variable: A list of characters that separate fields used by the shell to split text strings.

$#    Stores the number of command-line arguments that
      were passed to the shell program.
$?    Stores the exit value of the last command that was
      executed.
$0    Stores the first word of the entered command (the
      name of the shell program).
$*    Stores all the arguments that were entered on the
      command line ($1 $2 ...).
"$@"  Stores all the arguments that were entered
      on the command line, individually quoted ("$1" "$2" ...).

Or an awk solution awk 'NR == 1; NR > 1 {print $0 | "sort -n"}'
It is very handy to use.

Test:
tommy@tommy-ThinkPad-T420:~$ cat body_sort.txt
header
4
6
9
7
14
8

tommy@tommy-ThinkPad-T420:~$ cat body_sort.txt |( read -r; printf "%s\n" "$REPLY"; sort -n)
header
4
6
7
8
9
14

sort unix

Unix sort except the first line

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