sort-table

name	sort-table
description	Use when sorting tab-delimited, nonblank text rows with GNU `sort` while preserving a fixed tab field separator in shell pipelines.
disable-model-invocation	true
user-invocable	true

sort-table

Minimal shell wrapper around GNU sort. It first removes blank lines with grep '.', then calls sort -t $'\\t' "$@", so tab is always the field separator.

Quick Start

• Command: ... | sort-table [sort-args]
• Local executable: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/sort-table
• Fixed delimiter: tab

When To Use This Tool

• Sorting tab-delimited rows without repeatedly spelling out the tab separator
• Passing normal GNU sort key or numeric flags through a thin wrapper
• Cleaning out blank lines before sorting tabular text
• Reusing a predictable tab-based sort primitive inside bioinformatics shell pipelines

Common Patterns

# Numeric sort on the second tab-delimited column
printf 'z\t10\n\na\t2\nb\t1\n' | sort-table -k 2,2n

# Lexicographic sort on the first column
cat table.tsv | sort-table -k 1,1

# Reverse numeric sort on a score column
cat table.tsv | sort-table -k 3,3nr

Recommended Workflow

1. Make sure the input is truly tab-delimited text.
2. Pass ordinary GNU sort arguments exactly as you would to sort, except you do not need to specify -t $'\\t'.
3. Write the sorted output to stdout or redirect it to a file.
4. If you need documentation for flag semantics, consult GNU sort, not this wrapper.

Guardrails

• Blank lines are dropped unconditionally because the wrapper begins with grep '.'.
• -h is not help here; it is forwarded to GNU sort as the human-numeric flag, so sort-table -h with no data does not print usage.
• --version is forwarded to GNU sort; in this environment it reported sort (GNU coreutils) 9.10.
• In live testing, printf 'z\t10\n\na\t2\nb\t1\n' | sort-table -k 2,2n yielded b\t1, a\t2, z\t10.