Dear GNU I suggest that we add a new flag to Sort, to skip certain number of lines from the sorting and copy them verbatim to the output, for example cat temp 10 8 1 2 3 4 5 > sort -z2 temp 10 8 5 4 3 2 1 In this example, the parameter "z" tell the app to ignore first two lines and copy them as is. naturally this can be done with a combination of Sort and Head, but it is obvious it should be part of the tool. Federico AlvesS