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 }; .)