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  • @forcefsck: I don't think it's possible with only sort -k. The begfield function in GNU sort just counts down to zero. Your decorate-sort-undecorate (DSU) approach seems to be the best way I think. Commented Apr 2, 2011 at 23:20
  • Out of interest, why $NF,$RS and not $NF,$0? I didn't know $RS did that. (I guess it's equivalent to $NF,$"\n", which does the same, but that's also surprising I think.) Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 0:36
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    @johnny8888, @forcefsck: In awk, $ can be followed by any expression. “The effect of the field number expression evaluating to anything other than a non-negative integer is unspecified”. GNU awk (on my system) treats a string like "\n" as zero. Others (e.g. the original implementation by A, W and K) abort with an error message. If RS happened to be a digit, you'd get the corresponding field on any implementation. So don't do this, use $0. Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 11:51
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    Really neat! So the long explanation of what is going on: with awk, print the last field first then the whole record, sort in reverse numerically, then trim off the first column using cut. Commented Nov 7, 2016 at 15:00
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    The method used here is called Schwartzian transform. Commented Nov 23, 2021 at 20:48