From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Loris Bennett" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Sorting lines by length Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 14:56:33 +0200 Organization: Freie Universitaet Berlin Message-ID: <87k353zptq.fsf@hornfels.zedat.fu-berlin.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1410872437 9241 80.91.229.3 (16 Sep 2014 13:00:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 13:00:37 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Sep 16 15:00:30 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1XTsMu-0000KP-UO for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 16 Sep 2014 15:00:29 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:37839 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XTsMu-0000Lg-Kv for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 16 Sep 2014 09:00:28 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 30 Original-X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de amD+pSgIZvv60mEyvFzybQH1zeMDJ6GtCSKijvKwfWBLu2 Cancel-Lock: sha1:+CfQWU3uketrn8gQ966woMiMhBU= User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:207679 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:99952 Archived-At: Hi, Is there a canonical way of sorting lines by length, longest first? I have a file with which might look like this: 7-Jan-2013 node025 node061 14-Jan-2013 node025 node034 node061 21-Jan-2013 node025 node034 node050 node061 28-Jan-2013 node025 node034 node061 4-Feb-2013 node025 node034 node061 11-Feb-2013 node025 node034 node061 18-Feb-2013 node034 25-Feb-2013 node034 11-Mar-2013 node025 I actually just need the longest line first. For the example above this is quite easy to see, but in the real file, there are around 100 lines and the longest might have around 1000 characters. My use case is reading the data into an R data frame. The number of columns in the resulting data frame seems to be determined by the number of items in the first line. Cheers, Loris -- This signature is currently under construction.