Frederik Eaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I've given many examples - can you give an example of a situation > where people would put (a) differently-formatted numbers in a column > of a file (how would they become differently-formatted?) and then sort > randomly based on their values, (b) insisting that ties stay together?
No, but that's because I don't know what the phrase "sort randomly based on their values" means. If it's really a random process, it will ignore their values; then it's not a sort at all. > When you want to rearrange lines of a file, you turn to one command > - sort. No, it depends on what sort of rearrangement I want. If I want to reverse the file, for example, I'll use "tac". > you might want to sort on one key and randomize on another That can be done easily by combining "permute" and "sort", no? You permute the input, then use a stable sort on the key that you want to sort by. > none of the existing programs handle large files as well as 'sort' > does. "tac" does. >> That's OK in many applications. (You have 30 black balls and 20 white >> balls in an urn, and want to select 7 balls without replacement....) > > OK, after some thought I agree with you. Do you think it would be too > confusing to have both alternatives available? It'd be nicer if we had just one alternative. And it's pretty easy: just do "sort -u | permute" if you want to avoid duplicates. So I still don't see why this functionality should be part of "sort". _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
