This is used by Expire to sort a rebuilt history file.
The original program was written in December 1988 by Mike Haertel. It is highly configurable using many command line options.
Calling the program with the -? option will display a usage help:
Usage: sort [OPTION]... [FILE]... Write sorted concatenation of all FILE(s) to standard output. +POS1 [-POS2] start a key at POS1, end it before POS2 -M compare (unknown) <`JAN' < ... < `DEC', imply -b -T DIRECTORY use DIRECTORY for temporary files -b ignore leading blanks in sort fields or keys -c check if given files already sorted, do not sort -d consider only [a-zA-Z0-9 ] characters in keys -f fold lower case to upper case characters in keys -i consider only [\040-\0176] characters in keys -k POS1[,POS2] same as +POS1 [-POS2], but all positions counted from 1 -m merge already sorted files, do not sort -n compare according to string numerical value, imply -b -o FILE write result on FILE instead of standard output -r reverse the result of comparisons -s stabilize sort by disabling last resort comparison -t SEP use SEParator instead of non- to whitespace transition -u with -c, check for strict ordering -u with -m, only output the first of an equal sequence POS is F[.C][OPTS], where F is the field number and C the character position in the field, both counted from zero. OPTS is made up of one or more of Mbdfinr. This effectively disables global -Mbdfinr settings for that key. If no key is given, use the entire line as key. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.
URL: changi/manual/exsort.html Created: 25 August 1996 Revised: 21 November 1996 Author: harald@os2point.ping.de |