I've never heard of your use case before--that is interesting. Though I'm not sure I see why the "%5d" method is hard to parse... nl /usr/share/dict/words |

I've never heard of your use case before--that is interesting. Though I'm not sure I see why the "%5d" method is hard to parse... nl /usr/share/dict/words | head -20 | sort -n seems to work ok. "cut -f 2" and "cut -c 8-" also seem to work well in this case.