sort by word length in Nth column

Question

I've got a column file like this:

1 1 1 AKSDFJADFKASDJFAK
2 1 1 ADKLCJASDLKCJDLACKADCJLKDACJADS
3 1 2 AKLJDFHALKDJFHLKJSDKSDFHAKJFDHAKFHJAKFJ

And I would like to sort the entries by the fourth column, with the longest word first. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Try this:

awk '{print $0" "length($4)}' infile | sort -k5,5rn | sed -e 's/ [0-9]*$//' > outfile