11 Mar
2020
11 Mar
'20
12:09 a.m.
On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 1:44 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote:
On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 13:38:23 -0400 Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks; that makes sense. I'm still interested in historical data, though.
:-)
- Dan C.
This begs questions of stability: in the event of non-unique keys and
non-key fields in the sortable data, which "records" (lines) are kept and
which are discarded? Surely the "first" is kept and subsequent entries
with
the same key suppressed, but I confess I
don't know enough about the
internals of sed to know even what algorithm it uses (I assume a
disk-based
merge sort?), but I would imagine these details
have changed over time.
FreeBSD manpage for sort says that -u implies a stable sort,
similar to -s.