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

Here's a bash shell function derived from the other answers. It handles both files and pipes. First argument is the file name or '-' for stdin. Remaining arguments are passed to sort. A couple examples:

$ hsort myfile.txt
$ head -n 100 myfile.txt | hsort -
$ hsort myfile.txt -k 2,2 | head -n 20 | hsort - -r

The shell function:

hsort ()
{
   if [ "$1" == "-h" ]; then
       echo "Sort a file or standard input, treating the first line as a header.";
       echo "The first argument is the file or '-' for standard input. Additional";
       echo "arguments to sort follow the first argument, including other files.";
       echo "File syntax : $ hsort file [sort-options] [file...]";
       echo "STDIN syntax: $ hsort - [sort-options] [file...]";
       return 0;
   elif [ -f "$1" ]; then
       local file=$1;
       shift;
       (head -n 1 $file && tail -n +2 $file | sort $*);
   elif [ "$1" == "-" ]; then
       shift;
       (read -r; printf "%s\n" "$REPLY"; sort $*);
   else
       >&2 echo "Error. File not found: $1";
       >&2 echo "Use either 'hsort  [sort-options]' or 'hsort - [sort-options]'";
       return 1 ;
   fi
}