PARSORT(1)

NAME
parsort - Sort (big files) in parallel

SYNOPSIS
parsort options for sort

DESCRIPTION
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.

OPTIONS
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.

EXAMPLE
Sort files:

  parsort *.txt > sorted.txt

Sort stdin (standard input) numerically:

  cat numbers | parsort -n > sorted.txt

PERFORMANCE
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.

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

LICENSE
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/>.

DEPENDENCIES
parsort uses sort, bash, and parallel.

SEE ALSO
sort