unix skip-header bash function

Question

Somewhere on stackoverflow I got a bash function called "body" which would echo the header (first line) of a file, and pass the body (rest of the lines) along to stdout. This has been very useful for me to work with files that have headers.

Example:

file.csv:

field1,field2
a,2
b,1

Commands:

$ sort -k2,2 -nr file.csv -t,
a,2
b,1
field1,field2

$ cat file.csv | body sort -nr -t, -k2,2
field1,field2
a,2
b,1

Not a great example, but it shows the header staying on top.

Minutes of Googling and searching stackoverflow have revealed nothing.

Can anyone find or reconstruct such a function?

Answer 1

Here is one way that would allow you to grab the header... and then grab the rest of the csv file, and sort (or whatever else you want to do with the data,) and it all gets saved to the outpipe.

head -1 file.csv > outpipe | tail -n+2 file.csv | sort >> outpipe

Edit:

If that approach doesn't work for you, you could always try something like the answers in this previous discussion.