> That's because numbers look better when they are right justified. They don't look better to a computer though. And that's what I don't get. Why are the defau

> That's because numbers look better when they are right justified. They don't look better to a computer though. And that's what I don't get. Why are the defaults geared towards typesetting (human consumption) while cut/sort/join friendly output is so painful to produce? This is a very common scenario when processing log files: line numbering, then sorting on another field followed by join/grep/head to grab a subset of interest, then recovering the original line numbers for the subset of interest. Honestly half the time I end up doing this, just because it's the shortest invocation that comes to mind: perl -lape '$_="$.\t$_"'