lsort is a very
simple tool (in fact, just a Perl one-liner), but it does a job that
is not very easy to do with classic Unix on-board equipment: sort
lines by their length.
An example application would be to cheat at some word games: what’s the longest word that contains all vocals in reverse alphabetic order?
% grep u.*o.*i.*e.*a /usr/share/dict/words |lsort
unnoticeable
subcontinental
uncomplimentary
Together with head and tail, this tool is also useful for finding
the shortest and longest lines (e.g. to find very long filenames or
huge entries in symbol tables):
% nm -D /usr/lib/chromium/chromium | lsort | tail -1
(Actually, wc -L can output the longest line length, but not the
longest line.)
NP: Aimee Mann—Driving Sideways