On Nov 22, 2006, at 10:13 AM, Bob R. wrote:

> Thanks, Mark.  I thought something might be there in shell  
> scripting, but I could not
> remember.

Take a look at man sort if you need anything fancy.  Unix sort can do  
many interesting things (including sorting English 3-character month  
abbreviations  in the sequence of the months during the year),  
sorting numerically (so that 9 comes before 10), ignoring leading  
spaces, sorting on multiple fields (keys), returning only a single  
copy of items which aren't unique (per the keys), checking that the  
input is already in order, rather than changing the order, and so on.

   --John