MSORT(1) User Commands MSORT(1)NAMEmsort - sort records in complex ways
SYNOPSISmsort <options> [<input file>]
DESCRIPTIONmsort is a program for sorting text files in sophisticated ways. It
was developed initially for alphabetizing dictionaries of languages in
which the ordering may be quite different from English but has many
other uses.
msort allows you to sort blocks of text delimited in a number of ways
rather than just lines and to specify particular fields of a record as
sort keys using either their position, counted from either end, or by
matching regular expressions to their tags.
msort is capable of sorting on multiple keys, so that when two records
tie on one key, the tie may be broken on another. Any or all keys may
be optional. How absent optional keys are ordered with respect to
present keys may be set separately for each key.
msort allows you to specify arbitrary sort orders and to define virtu‐
ally unlimited numbers of multigraphs of effectively unlimited length.
The sort order and multigraphs are defined separately for each key. If
your system has locale support, you can also use locale collation rules
instead of specify your own sort order.
msort provides twelve types of key comparison: lexicographic, numeric,
numeric string, hybrid, by string length, by angle, by date, by domain
name, by time, by ISO8601 date/time stamp, by month name, and random.
What month names are used is a bit complicated. If the -s flag is used
on the same key and its argument is the name of a file, the month names
are read from the file, which should be in the same format as a sort
order definition file. If the -s flag is used and its argument is a
locale name, the month names recognized will be the month names and
abbreviations associated with the specified locale. If the -s flag is
not used the month names recognized will be the month names and abbre‐
viations associated with the current locale. If your system does not
have locale support and you do not use the -s flag to read the month
names from a file, the month names recognized will be the English month
names and abbreviations.
msort can reverse the characters in a key, allowing it to be used to
generate reverse dictionaries.
A choice of sorting algorithms is provided.
msort fully supports Unicode. The text to be sorted, and all specifica‐
tions, should be in UTF-8 Unicode. (If you have plain ASCII text, this
is not a problem as ASCII is a subset of Unicode.) Full Unicode case-
folding is available, in Turkic and non-Turkic variants. Unicode nor‐
malization is performed before sorting.
For usage information, execute msort with no arguments.
Full information about msort is currently to be found in the reference
manual, which is distributed as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file.
If a copy is not available locally, you can download it from msort's
home page:
http://billposer.org/Software/msort.html
OPTIONS
Informational options
-h,--help
Print usage message
-v,--version
Print version message
-D,--defaults
List defaults
-F,--general-options
List general command line options
-G,--gnu-equivalences
List equivalents for GNU sort command line options.
-H,--informational-options
List informational command line options
-K,--key-specific-options
List key-specific command line options
-L,--limits
List limits
-N,--number-systems
List the supported number systems.
General options
-b,--block
A record is terminated by two or more newlines
-l,--line
A record consists of a single line
-r,--record-separator <separator>
A record is terminated by separator character
-O,--fixed-size-record <bytes>
A record consists of the specified number of bytes.
-d,--field-separators <character>+
Fields are delimited by the named character(s)-w,--whole
Sort on the entire text of the record
-a,--algorithm <algorithm>
Use the specified sort algorithm. The choices are: I(nsertion‐
Sort), M(ergeSort), Q(uickSort), and S(hellSort). Note that
InsertionSort and MergeSort are stable, while QuickSort and
ShellSort are unstable. The default is QuickSort.
-M,-initial-maximum-records <records>
Set initial maximum number of records
-m,--line-end-carriage-return
End-of-line in the input data is marked by Carriage Return
(0x0D) as on the Macintosh rather than by Line Feed (0x0A) as on
Unix systems.
-I,--invert-globally
Invert sense of comparisons globally
-B,--BMP
No characters fall outside the Basic Multingual Plane (that is,
have values greater than 0xFFFF).
-Z,--skip-first-record
Copy the first record in the input to the output without sorting
it. This is useful for sorting files with a header.
-p,--reserve-private-use-area
Do not make internal use of the Private Use areas. By default,
multigraphs are assigned internally to codepoints in the Supple‐
mentary Private Use areas if full Unicode is in use or to code‐
points in the Private Use area if input is restricted to the
Basic Multilingual Plane by means of the -B option. If your
input makes use of the Private Use areas, this option prevents
interference with your input. In this case, multigraphs will be
assigned to the Low and High Surrogate areas (0xD800-0xDFFF).
Note that this limits the number of multigraphs to 2,048.
-P,--random-seed <seed>
Set the seed for the random number generator. If not set here,
it is set to a value determined by the time. The seed used is
reported in the log. This option allows runs to be replicated.
-Q,--check-only
Check whether the input is already sorted. Do not generate any
output. Exit status is 0 if input is already sorted, 11 if not
sorted.
-1,--in <input file name>
-2,--out <output file name>
If the output file is the same as the input file, the input file
will be overwritten. The input file will not be overwritten if
the run is unsuccessful.
-j,--suppress-log
Suppress output to the log. If this flag is given before there
is any output to the log from a command line flag, nothing will
be written to the log and the log file will not be created. If a
command line flag generates a log message before this flag is
processed, the log file will be created but no log messages will
be written to it once this flag is processed. To guarantee that
no attempt will be made to open a log file, give this flag
first.
-q,--quiet
Be quiet - do not chat while working
-u,--unicode-normalization <mode>
Select Unicode normalization mode. The choices of mode are: c
for normalization form C (NFC), d for normalization form D
(NFD), C for normalization form KC (NFKC), D for normalization
form KD (NFKD), and n for no normalization. The default is NFC.
Key specific options
-e,--character-range <m,n>
Sort on characters m through n. Positive indices start from one.
Negative indices indicate position with respect to the end of
the record. For example, the range 3,-2 consists of the third
character through the next-to-last character.
-n,--position <POS>(,<POS>)
Sort on the specified POS or contiguous range of POSs, where a
POS is of the form <field number>(.<character number>). Both
counts begin at one. Field numbers but not character numbers
may be negative, in which case they are counted from the right.
Thus, 1.2 is the second character of the first field; -2.1 is
the first character of the next to last field.
-t,--tag <tag regexp>
Sort on the field with the specified tag
-o,--optional <comparison>
Optional: compare as (<,=,>) to present key if absent
-C,--fold-case
Fold case
-z,--fold-case-turkic
Fold case with additional Turkic conversions.
-c,--comparison-type <comparison type>
a(ngle),l(exicographic), i(so8601 date/time), t(ime), D(omain
name/email address), d(ate), m(onth name), n(umeric), N(umeric
string),s(ize), h(hybrid), r(andom)-y,--number-system <number system>
Specifies the number system expected for this key. This affects
only numeric and numeric string keys. There are two special val‐
ues. If the number system is "all", records may contain any num‐
ber system that msort can interpret. Different records may con‐
tain different number systems. If the number system is "any",
records may contain any writing system that msort can interpret,
but all records must make use of the same number system. msort
sets the number system on the basis of the first record.
-f,--date-format <date format>
Permutation of ymd with separators, e.g. y-m-d for international
date format, m/d/y for American date format, or a permutation of
yd with separators, e.g. y-d, for day-of-year dates. All three
components may be numbers in any available number system. The
month field may also be a month name, determined by the same
devices as independent month name fields.
-W,--sort-order-file-separators <file name>
Read the list of characters to be treated as separators in the
sort order definition file.
-S,--substitutions <file name>
Read substitutions from named file
-s,--sort-order <file name>|<locale name>|"locale"
If the argument is a file name, it is taken to be a sort order
file and the sort order for the key is read from the file. If
the argument is a locale name, the collation rules for that
locale are used. If the argument is "locale", the collation
rules for the current locale are used.
-T,--transformations <(d)(e)(s)>
Apply the specified transformations. d specifies that diacrit‐
ics are to be stripped. Separately encoded combining diacritics
are removed. Characters with diacritics represented by single
codepoints are replaced with the corresponding ASCII character
without the diacritics, if there is one. e specifies that
enclosed characters, that is, characters within circles or
parentheses, are to be replaced with the corresponding plain
ASCII character if there is one. s specifies that characters in
special styles are to be replaced with the corresponding plain
ASCII character if there is one. Stylistic equivalents include:
small capitals (e.g. U+1D04), script forms (e.g. U+212C), black
letter forms (e.g. U+212D), Arabic presentation forms (e.g.
U+FE81), Hebrew presentation forms (e.g. U+FB1D), fullwidth
forms (e.g. U+FF01), halfwidth forms (e.g. U+FF7B), and the
mathematical alphanumeric symbols (e.g. U+1D400).
-x,--exclusion-file <file name>
Read exclusions from named file
-X,--exclude-characters <exclusions>
Exclude specified characters
-i,--invert-locally
Invert sense of comparisons
-R,--reverse-key
Reverse characters of key
-A,--first-character-only
Ignore all but the first character of the field, after substitu‐
tions, exclusions, etc.
Note: long options may not be available on your system.
SEE ALSOsort(1), uninum(3)AUTHOR
Bill Poser (billposer@alum.mit.edu)
LICENSE
GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), ver‐
sion 3.
msort January 2010 MSORT(1)
