A new sort utility
The recent thread about BSD-licensed replacements for GNU utilities in OpenBSD has prompted me to share my reimplementation of the sort(1) utility. Most of the code is new. sort.1 and obsolete.c came from 4.4BSD via NetBSD. I've been using it instead of GNU sort on my systems for the past few months, I've run a few test suites on it, and I think most of the bugs have been ironed out now. If anyone's interested, it's available here: http://people.freebsd.org/~tjr/sort1.tar.gz It's not quite as fast as the GNU or 4.4BSD sort implementations, but it's BSD-licensed, follows the normal BSD coding conventions, has better locale support than 4.4BSD's (and perhaps GNU's, too), and I believe it's much less buggy than the 4.4BSD sort (sort -n is horribly broken in 4.4BSD's, see the NetBSD PR database for an example). It attempts to conform to the POSIX standards; by default it follows 1003.2-1992, removing the CFLAGS+=-DOBSOLETE line in the Makefile will make it follow 1003.1-2001. Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. I have a diff(1) replacement (with sdiff support) in the works, among other things. Tim ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
It seems Tim Robbins wrote: Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. I have a diff(1) replacement (with sdiff support) in the works, among other things. Go for it!! the more GPL'd stuff we can remove the better!! -Søren ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 08:53:56PM +1000, Tim Robbins wrote: It's not quite as fast as the GNU or 4.4BSD sort implementations Why is this? I often need to sort huge files, so I'd be reluctant to use an implementation with a significant performance penalty. Kris pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: A new sort utility
On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 11:43:07AM -0700, Kris Kennaway wrote: On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 08:53:56PM +1000, Tim Robbins wrote: It's not quite as fast as the GNU or 4.4BSD sort implementations Why is this? Because it spends too much time comparing lines. In particular, it seems to be spending a lot of time extracting the specified fields from lines, even when no -k options are specified. It's also more general than the 4.4BSD implementation, which can't sort according to the locale's LC_COLLATE settings, and has a lot of difficulty sorting numbers (with the -n option) properly. If speed was everything, we'd already be using that one -- it's significantly faster than GNU. I often need to sort huge files, so I'd be reluctant to use an implementation with a significant performance penalty. It would be great if you could compare my sort against GNU on some real world data and let me know how it goes. Tim ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
At 8:53 PM +1000 9/15/03, Tim Robbins wrote: Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. Might we put this in freebsd-current (5.x), but under some other name? sortbsd, or something? -- Garance Alistair Drosehn= [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteor [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 08:24:00PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote: At 8:53 PM +1000 9/15/03, Tim Robbins wrote: Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. Might we put this in freebsd-current (5.x), but under some other name? sortbsd, or something? ports/sysutils/bsdutils-tjr And of course with the option to overwrite the base installed stuff :-) Edwin -- Edwin Groothuis |Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]|Weblog: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/weblog.php ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
Garance A Drosihn wrote: At 8:53 PM +1000 9/15/03, Tim Robbins wrote: Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. Might we put this in freebsd-current (5.x), but under some other name? sortbsd, or something? Why would you want to do that? Unless the performance difference is huge, I don't see the problem. Since the number of people that really that extra 10% (or whatever) of speed (for sort) is small, I would suggest the reverse. Replace the current sort with the BSD licensed version, and move the current one to a port gnu-sort, or whatever. I suddenly feel the need to go build a bikeshed. Richard Coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Richard Coleman wrote: Garance A Drosihn wrote: At 8:53 PM +1000 9/15/03, Tim Robbins wrote: Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. Might we put this in freebsd-current (5.x), but under some other name? sortbsd, or something? Why would you want to do that? Unless the performance difference is huge, I don't see the problem. Since the number of people that really that extra 10% (or whatever) of speed (for sort) is small, I would suggest the reverse. Replace the current sort with the BSD licensed version, and move the current one to a port gnu-sort, or whatever. This was exactly what I was thinking. Tim, can you mail -arch with this proposal? Doug -- This .signature sanitized for your protection ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A new sort utility
At 9:47 PM -0400 9/15/03, Richard Coleman wrote: Garance A Drosihn wrote: At 8:53 PM +1000 9/15/03, Tim Robbins wrote: Comments/patches are welcome. As the History suggestion of the manual page suggests, my plan is to get this in to FreeBSD 6, along with replacements for some other GNU tools. Might we put this in freebsd-current (5.x), but under some other name? sortbsd, or something? Why would you want to do that? Just so we could have it in 5.x, instead of the stated plan of waiting until 6.x. I do not feel strongly about it, other than to say that it'd be nice if this was part of 5.x, and I don't know if we want to switch to rewrite of 'sort' at this point in 5.x. *Someday* we've got to stop dropping in major changes to 5.x, and get serious about releasing it as -stable so we can start on 6.x-current. Just my 2 cents. I don't feel strongly about it. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn= [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteor [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
