What really is the difference between `sort LastWriteTime` and `sort --LastWriteTime`? An argument without the dashes doesn't seem any fundamentally different from a flag.
You need the -f flag to sort as well to ignore case during the sorting. I don't know how portable the flags to sort are though which is why I didn't bother using them.
"The unix command line ('cat foo.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn') is wonderfully concise and powerful". And yet, contrary to the author's assertion, it can be made even more concise without sacrificing the power:
Ah, yeah, I had misread the docs there. Though I imagine it creates that unexpected for beginner's thing where `ls | sort` comes back with "no such file |" or similar. Basically, I'm saying there is a place for an interface that does pass a single string to the shell, and an interface where you specify args explicitly.
They are both technical, but 'order by bytes desc' has got to be more expressive than 'sort -nr'. It's almost natural human English, whereas the latter doesn't express anything.
That said, I don't know how much time it would genuinely save. As with most of these tools, you shouldn't be installing them on production servers, so you still have to know Bash anyway.
I can't believe this past has sort | uniq when GNU sort (important distinction, the BSD version and hence OSX can't) has a -u flag so sort -u == sort | uniq
And that line, at least for sorting, belongs firmly outside the filesystem.
Sorting is locale-dependent. Whether a letter-with-dots sorts next to letter-without-dots or somewhere completely different has no correct global answer.
(You sound like someone who would probably know this, but a lot of people don't).
Note that in general "sort -nu" is not equivalent to "sort -n | uniq", although in this particular case they are. If you have more than one field on the line, they can differ.
For example, if the input is:
3 first
2 second
3 second
1 second
2 first
1 first
then this is the "sort -nu" output:
1 second
2 second
3 first
whereas "sort -n | uniq" gives:
1 first
1 second
2 first
2 second
3 first
3 second
I'm a bit confused as to how "sort -nu" chooses which record to print when there are more than one with the same key. I would have expected the chosen record to be the one that would have come first in "sort -n" output, so that "sort -n | sort -nu" would be equivalent to "sort -nu", but that is not the case. The pipe gives:
What really is the difference between `sort LastWriteTime` and `sort --LastWriteTime`? An argument without the dashes doesn't seem any fundamentally different from a flag.
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