COHERENT manpages
This page displays the COHERENT manpage for mksort [Sort the standard input, allowing arbitrarily long lines].
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mksort -- Command Sort the standard input, allowing arbitrarily long lines /usr/lib/mail/mksort [ -f ] [ file ... ] The command mksort reads lines of text, sorts them by the first field in each line, then writes them to the standard output. It usually is used by system administrators to help prepare the data files used by smail. Unlike the COHERENT command sort, mksort can read and process an arbitrarily long line of text. The first field within a line of input is delimited either by a white-space character or a colon `:'. A line can be of any length, as long as the entire input can be stored in memory. Command-lind option -f (for ``fold'') tells mksort to ignore case when it sorts its input; with this option, the letter `A' equals the letter `a', and `a' is always less than `B'. If its command line does not name an input file, mksort reads the standard input. A file name of `-' indicates the standard input; this permits mksort to mingle the contents of one or more files with what it reads from the standard input. Example The following example demonstrates how to use mksort with mkline. Consider file aliases, which contains the following aliasing information: Postmaster:hustead # Ted Hustead, jr. UUCP-Postmasters: tron, chongo # namei contacts yamato # kremvax contact tron: tron@namei.uucp (Ronald S. Karr) yamato: yamato@kremvax.ussr.comm (Yamato T. Yankelovich) chongo: chongo@eek.uts.amdahl.com (Landon Curt Noll) Given this file, the command mkline aliases | mksort -f yields: chongo:chongo@eek.uts.amdahl.com Postmaster:hustead tron:tron@namei.uucp UUCP-Postmasters:tron,chongo yamato yamato:yamato@kremvax.ussr.comm See Also commands, mail [overview], mkline, mkdbm, pathalias, smail Notes This command is not used by COHERENT's implementation of smail. Copyright © 1987, 1988 Ronald S. Karr and Landon Curt Noll. Copyright © 1992 Ronald S. Karr. For details on the distribution rights and restrictions associated with this software, see file COPYING, which is included with the source code to the smail system; or type the command: smail -bc.