Donita Luddington <doniludd@sbcglobal.net> writes:

> Do you know if sort can be told to sort all but the first line?

Usually people extract the line, and put it back.
Here is a simple way to do this.

head -1 hosts >hosts.head
sed '1d' hosts | sort <options> >hosts.rest
mv hosts hosts.backup
cat hosts.head hosts.rest >hosts
rm hosts.head hosts.rest