Is there a way to ignore header lines in a UNIX sort?

Question

I have a fixed-width-field file which I\'m trying to sort using the UNIX (Cygwin, in my case) sort utility.

The problem is there is a two-line header at the top of t

Answer 1

If you don't mind using awk, you can take advantage of awk's built-in pipe abilities

eg.

extract_data | awk 'NR<3{print $0;next}{print $0| "sort -r"}' 

This prints the first two lines verbatim and pipes the rest through sort.

Note that this has the very specific advantage of being able to selectively sort parts of a piped input. all the other methods suggested will only sort plain files which can be read multiple times. This works on anything.