Sorting lines from longest to shortest [duplicate]

Answer 1

Perl version, with a tip of the hat to @thiton:

perl -ne 'print length($_)." $_"' file | sort -r -n | cut -d ' ' -f 2-

$_ is the current line, similar to awk's $0

perl-5.24 execution on a 550MB .txt file with 6 million lines (British National Corpus) took 24 seconds

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@thiton's awk (3.1.7) execution took 26 seconds

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With a tip of the hat to @William Pursell from a related post:

perl -ne 'push @a, $_; END{ print reverse sort { length $a <=> length $b } @a }' file

perl-5.24 execution took 12.0 seconds

Answer 2

TIM (my terse version for TIMTOWTDI... hmm but now it's long already :(

perl -ne '@a = <>; print sort { length $b <=> length $a } @a' file

lets reserve reverse and push when needed

and I wonder how long it would take on that 550MB file

Answer 3

Add the line length as the first field of the line, sort, and remove the line length:

awk '{ print length($0) " " $0; }' $file | sort -r -n | cut -d ' ' -f 2-

Answer 4

With POSIX Awk:

{
  c = length
  m[c] = m[c] ? m[c] RS $0 : $0
} END {
  for (c in m) q[++x] = m[c]
  while (x) print q[x--]
}

Example