Specifying sort fields

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Fri Apr 23 07:28:18 PDT 2004


In the last episode (Apr 23), JJB said:
> Thank you that worked. You know that nowhere in the 'man sort' info
> does it say that to use sort command you have to use pipe commands to
> feed it data. How is somebody without UNIX programming background
> going to read that and know how to feed sort it's data to sort? Don't
> you think the man sort info needs updating to explain this fact? 
> Even some examples at end of technical info would go long way to
> making the 'man sort' info user friendly and meaningfully.

Well, it does, sort of:

    SYNOPSIS
           sort [OPTION]... [FILE]...

    DESCRIPTION
           Write sorted concatenation of all FILE(s) to standard output.

and a bit farther down:

           With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

I agree that examples would be nice.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


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