[alloyed]

the point is well-taken, but i do want to show the bash version just for fun:

    podman image ls --all | sed 's/\s\s\+/\t/g' | tee >(head -n 1) >(tail -n +2 | sort -hrk 5) >/dev/null

this is _still_ all text, and we're relying heavily on sort to do a bunch of internal parsing and be in agreement with podman about how sizes should be formatted. also, for "real world" work, i dunno if the tee trick here has any kind of order guarantees, just that it works fine in this case. I'd probably just end up dropping the header and living with worse output in reality

[jcgl]

Ooh, I was so hoping someone would take up the challenge! This is a far shorter answer than I had honestly thought was possible. More readable too, somehow? Great use of tee that I would never have come up with (though I hear what you say about there maybe not being ordering guarantees).

Unfortunately, it's not 100% correct, due to misaligned headers:

  REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
  registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox 44 5a36f433c691 2 months ago 2.14 GB
  quay.io/keycloak/keycloak latest 1361d6e49205 9 days ago 478 MB
  ...

I think that speaks to your final point, which is spot-on:

> I'd probably just end up dropping the header and living with worse output in reality

This pretty much sums up plain text and unix shell imo. It's very much the pragmatic solution here, and it's what ~100% of shell scripters would choose to do. And it should make anyone question the orthodoxy around the "power" of plain text in shells.

[i15e]

A variant:

  docker image ls -a | stdbuf -oL sed -r 's/\s{2,}/\t/g' | { head -n1; tail -n+2 | sort -hrk5 -t$'\t'; } | column -ts$'\t'

I used docker since that's what I have installed and I assume the output is equivalent.

sort's -t is set to tab for field separation.

stdbuf sets sed's output to only buffer a line at a time and flush, so the head in the {...} command group doesn't completely consume stdin's contents before it's passed to tail.

The column command recreates the space-aligned table based on tab-delimited input.

[jcgl]

There is some cool stuff here.

I like using column to format the table. Appending it to alloyed's command fixes their header problem.

The stdbuf to multi-command block (term.?) is a neat trick. Although, one time when I ran this, I only got a couple lines of output. No idea why and I can't replicate it, but there could be some flakiness that results from the buffering somehow?

Question: how do the ? markers on the sort and column invocations work/what do they do?

[i15e]

I'm not seeing any ? marks in my code. Are you referring to the instances of $'\t'? In bash (and other shells, including recent versions of the POSIX sh specification) $'...' is treated like a C-style string complete with backslash escape sequences, so $'\t' is a way to have a tab character as a part of a command argument.

[jcgl]

Oops, yes, I don't know why I mistyped a question mark. That's exactly what I was wondering, thanks.