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NAME
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parsort - Sort (big files) in parallel


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SYNOPSIS
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\ **parsort**\  \ *options for sort*\ 


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DESCRIPTION
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\ **parsort**\  uses GNU \ **sort**\  to sort in parallel. It works just like \ **sort**\  but faster on inputs with more than 1 M lines, if you have a multicore machine.

Hopefully these ideas will make it into GNU \ **sort**\  in the future.


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OPTIONS
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Same as \ **sort**\ . Except:


- \ **--parallel=**\ \ *N*\ 
 
 Change the number of sorts run concurrently to \ *N*\ . \ *N*\  will be increased to number of files if \ **parsort**\  is given more than \ *N*\  files.
 



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EXAMPLE
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Sort files:


.. code-block:: bash

   parsort *.txt > sorted.txt


Sort stdin (standard input) numerically:


.. code-block:: bash

   cat numbers | parsort -n > sorted.txt



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PERFORMANCE
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\ **parsort**\  is faster on files than on stdin (standard input), because different parts of a file can be read in parallel.

On a 48 core machine you should see a speedup of 3x over \ **sort**\ .


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AUTHOR
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Copyright (C) 2020-2026 Ole Tange, http://ole.tange.dk and Free Software Foundation, Inc.


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LICENSE
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Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or at your option any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


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DEPENDENCIES
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\ **parsort**\  uses \ **sort**\ , \ **bash**\ , and \ **parallel**\ .


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SEE ALSO
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\ **sort**\ 

