the main file used to do with that awk script for reasons unbeknownst to
either of us
There is no way the output of sort can be written before its entire input was
generated. As I wrote in my last post: "the first line in the output can
possibly be the last processed line". Excerpt from 'info sort':
‘-o OUTPUT-FILE’
‘--output=OUTPUT-FILE’
Write output to OUTPUT-FILE instead of standard output. Normally,
‘sort’ reads all input before opening OUTPUT-FILE, so you can
safely sort a file in place by using commands like ‘sort -o F F’
and ‘cat F | sort -o F’. However, ‘sort’ with ‘--merge’
(‘-m’) can
open the output file before reading all input, so a command like
‘cat F | sort -m -o F - G’ is not safe as ‘sort’ might start
writing ‘F’ before ‘cat’ is done reading it.
