Fields used for sorting may overlap one another if desired.
When extracting key information from a record, BSORT pays attention to parameters in the following order:
Records with duplicate keys will appear in the output in the same order that they were specified in the input.
B escape sequences (e.g. '*t' for an ASCII tab character) may be used when specifying strings for SKip, STop, and IgnoreLeading.
The first pass of BSORT consists of a Tournament Sort. The tournament uses 4/5 of the workfile buffer, and grows this up to the specified Memorysize. The second pass of BSORT is a four-way merge. The four shortest strings from the tournament are merged first, then the next four shortest, and so on.
The algorithm of BSORT is designed for the usual time-sharing situation: a shared file system and synchronous I/O. BSORT may also be used under batch.
BSORT only processes system standard format files. If you have a UFF format file it must be converted to system standard format first.
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