Suppose I have a file with a gazillion lines in it and I want to know which line would come out first if I were to sort the file. It seems that GNU sort does not have that option. Even better would be to have the option to put out the first k sorted lines of an n-line file (you'd get the last k by using the -r option). Here's some info about algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm The idea is to *not* do this because of the massive computational demand: sort file | head -$k sort -r file | head -$k That would give the right answer, though. Is there anything that will do this sort of thing? Usually the problem is to sort numbers and maybe awk/gawk will be good for that job: http://www.google.com/search?q=awk+maximum+minimum Maybe that works for non-numeric data, too, so long as only a single column of the input is of interest. It would be good to have it pump out the entire line where the j-th column has the maximum or minimum value. I'm not sure how it would deal with ties -- probably by dropping all but one of them. Anyway, this seems like a missing tool in the GNU coreutils. If only we had one more sort option for doing this. Mike