sort question

[Paul Houtz]

chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>In article <810054 at hpsemc.HP.COM> gph at hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes:
>>... if you are reading from a file that has binary data in it, then it
>>is possible that a newline character could appear in the binary data.
>>This seems to me like it might be a problem.   Sort would think it
>>found the end of line.
>
>If your file is of binary data, you have more of a problem than that.
>Sort(1) sorts ASCII text files, not binary files.  (Numeric sorts are
>done by conversion to and from numeric values.)

   What unix sort do you use if you have a data file with mixed binary
and ascii fields?

   IBM has a number of sort utilities that will do this.

   The MPE and MPE XL sort utility handles this case fine.

   The VMS sort utility handles this too.

   Unless there is a sort utility on Unix that I haven't heard of, 
I don't think unix does this.   (Please don't tell me that it isn't 
a good idea to mix ascii and binary data in the same file).