Re: UTF-8 support for the ancient shell toys

[Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 3 Nov 2001 18:16:32 +0000 (GMT), in perl.unicode you wrote:

> In practice, Perl has long ago replaced grep, sort, tr, awk, for all but
> sentimental reasons.

I'd like to disagree with 'sort'. In some cases, at least, the
system-supplied sort(1) can do disk-based (merge?) sorting, enabling you
to sort files larger than the amount of virtual memory you have
installed. This is a task that's not trivial to do in Perl[1].

Cheers,
Philip

[1] It's undoubtedly not *hard*, if you know the algorithm, but it's not
*trivial* in the way that you can usually replace grep/tr/awk/sed
scripts with a Perl script trivially.
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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/