36.8 lensort: Sort Lines by Length

A nice little script to sort lines from shortest to longest can be handy when you're writing and want to find your big words:

deroff uniq	% deroff -w report | uniq -d | lensort a an ... deoxyribonucleic

Once I used it to sort a list of pathnames:

find	% find adir -type f -print | lensort adir/.x adir/.temp ... adir/subdir/part1/somefile adir/subdir/part1/a_test_case

The script uses awk ( 33.11 ) to print each line's length, followed by the original line. Next, sort sorts the lengths numerically ( 36.5 ) . Then sed ( 34.24 ) strips off the lengths and the spaces - and prints the lines:

#! /bin/sh awk 'BEGIN { FS=RS } { print length, $0 }' $* | # Sort the lines numerically sort +0n -1 | # Remove the length and the space and print each line sed 's/^[0-9][0-9]* //'

(Some awk s require a semicolon after the first curly bracket - that is, { FS=RS }; .)