| name | sort-by-length |
| description | Use when sorting plain text lines by character length, especially in shell pipelines where one logical item is stored per line. |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
| user-invocable | true |
sort-by-length
Tiny Bash wrapper around a one-line Perl sort. It reads stdin line by line and emits the same lines ordered by increasing string length.
Quick Start
- Command:
... | sort-by-length
- Local executable:
/home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/sort-by-length
- Implementation core:
perl -e 'print sort { length($a) <=> length($b) } <>'
When To Use This Tool
- Sorting one-item-per-line text streams by line length
- Reordering small identifier or sequence-string lists before downstream filtering
- Applying a lightweight length-based sort inside an EDirect-style shell pipeline
- Avoiding a custom Perl one-liner when a reusable wrapper already exists
Common Patterns
printf 'bbb\na\ncc\n' | sort-by-length
some_generator | sort-by-length | head
cat items.txt | sort-by-length > items.sorted.txt
Recommended Workflow
- Feed the tool a line-oriented text stream.
- Use it only when each logical item already occupies exactly one line.
- Capture or pipe the reordered output immediately into the next shell stage.
- If ties matter, assume Perl's default sort behavior rather than relying on an explicit stable-sort contract.
Guardrails
- This tool sorts lines, not multi-line FASTA/GenBank records, so it is unsafe for structured sequence files unless they have already been flattened to one record per line.
- There is no real
-h, --help, or --version interface; invoking it with flags and no stdin simply produces no useful metadata output.
- In local testing,
printf 'bbb\na\ncc\n' | sort-by-length produced a, cc, bbb, confirming ascending line-length order.
- The wrapper refuses to run only if
perl is missing; otherwise it passes stdin straight into the Perl expression.
