Msort8.51

Msort is a program for sorting files in sophisticated ways. It was originally developed for alphabetizing dictionaries of "exotic" languages, for which it has been extensively used, but is useful for many other purposes. msort differs from typical sort utilities in providing greater flexibility in parsing the input into records and identifying key fields and greater control over the sort order. msort understands UTF-8 Unicode. Unicode may be used anywhere that text is entered: in the text to be sorted, in sort order and exclusion definitions, as a field or record separator, or as a field tag. Full Unicode case-folding is available.

Msort's capabilities are very close to a superset of those of GNU sort. Msort provides greater flexibility in selecting key fields, more comparison types, the ability to use collation rules from different locales on different keys, and a variety of other options lacking in GNU sort. Capabilities of GNU sort lacking in msort are the ability to merge files without sorting them (the --merge option) and the ability to emit only the first of an equal run (the --unique option).

Generally speaking, msort is the more powerful program, either the only choice or the more convenient choice in cases in which something other than standard sorts of positionally selected fields are required. On the other hand, if GNU sort is capable of doing what you want, it will generally be faster. The exact ratio varies with the details of the sort and the nature of the input, but in my tests, where msort and GNU sort are capable of performing the same sort, GNU sort is typically two to three times faster.