sort(1) sorting IP (v4) addresses (INET_ATON?)

[Julian Elischer]

On 30/11/17 3:09 am, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>> I'm constantly dealing with IPv4 addresses (millions). Sorting the mass
>> is never perfect, and I'm forced to *visually* fix those out of order.
>> Yet I continue to (later) find some I've missed -- I'm sick of it!
>> Thus far, I've found I attain the best results with sort(1):
>>
>> sort -t . -k 4,4n -k 3,3n -k 2,2n  ./TCPLIST | sort -g>./SORTED
>>
>> Which ends up pretty damn close. But not perfect. :(
>> Then it occurred to me that adding INET_ATON to sort, allowing for
>> an additional -inet option to sort(1) for IP addresses -- hell if
>> MySQL can provide it[1], why the heck can't sort(1)?
>> Else I guess I'll have to try and give a shot at cobbling up a C
>> utility to manage it. But seems like too much work for something
>> that'll only accomplish one thing. :(
>>
>> Thanks for any thoughts, or further insight.
>>
>> [1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_inet-aton
> The old school on this is you do a substitue of the . for a <sp>
> and then just use sort -n on that then munge it back to have the .'s,
>
> Though I would not be opposed to sort learning about inet numbers,
> it should not be -inet as you would want to be able to apply
> this to fields as in 4i to sort the 4th field as an inet number.
> Actually I guess you need both to be orthagnal with -n and others.
>
>
and now to try make it work for compacted IPv6 numbers...