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