trivia: size of packages.gz shrinks when sorted

poking around, i ran into this, in case it is of interest ---- % zcat packages.gz | grep -v '#' | gzip | wc 1365 8020 351564 % zcat packages.gz | grep -v '#' | sort | gzip | wc 1022 6173 284473 ---- (only the last column -- bytes -- of the wc(1) output is meaningful.) cheers.