Cool, but obscure Unix tools

Re:Cool, but obscure Unix tools by sigil on Saturday May 21, 2011 @05:28AM (#2570561)

> That's because numbers look better when they are right justified.

They don't look better to a computer though. And that's what I don't get. Why are the defaults geared towards typesetting (human consumption) while cut/sort/join friendly output is so painful to produce?

This is a very common scenario when processing log files: line numbering, then sorting on another field followed by join/grep/head to grab a subset of interest, then recovering the original line numbers for the subset of interest.

Honestly half the time I end up doing this, just because it's the shortest invocation that comes to mind:

  perl -lape '$_="$.\t$_"'

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Re:Cool, but obscure Unix tools by __david__ on Saturday May 21, 2011 @07:50AM (#2570713)

I've never heard of your use case before--that is interesting.

Though I'm not sure I see why the "%5d" method is hard to parse...

  nl /usr/share/dict/words | head -20 | sort -n

seems to work ok. "cut -f 2" and "cut -c 8-" also seem to work well in this case.

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