PARSORT(1)

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this version · 15 versions
, in arch rolling, epel 10, epel 9, fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 PARSORT 💖 (that's section 1 of the manual, bestie)

okay so quick vibe check: this is the manual page for parsort, living in the parallel corner of your man pages, and it is literally the glow-up your sorting situation has been waiting for. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

parsort — Sort (big files) in parallel 🦋

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

parsort options for sort

like… you just give it the options you'd give sort. that's the whole bit. 💅

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so parsort uses GNU sort to sort in parallel. it works just like sort but faster — specifically when your input has more than 1 M lines and you've got a multicore machine. 👑

hopefully these ideas will make it into GNU sort in the future. fr fr, manifesting that. 🙏✨

💅 OPTIONS 💅

Same as sort. Except: 👇

  • --parallel=N — changes the number of sorts run concurrently to N. and lowkey here's the tea: N will be increased to the number of files if parsort is given more than N files. so it self-corrects, iconic behaviour honestly. 🫶

🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

Sort files:

parsort *.txt > sorted.txt

Sort stdin (standard input) numerically:

cat numbers | parsort -n > sorted.txt

not me piping numbers straight into it 😭 so easy. 🍓

🔥 PERFORMANCE 🔥

parsort is faster on files than on stdin (standard input), because different parts of a file can be read in parallel. that's the secret sauce. 🧚

On a 48 core machine you should see a speedup of 3x over sort. three whole times. ate. 💀🔥

👑 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/>.

okay bestie real talk: that warranty disclaimer is NOT a joke, there is genuinely NO WARRANTY, so don't come for anyone if it goes sideways. 😭 read the GPL, it's giving very much important. 📖

🧚 DEPENDENCIES 🧚

parsort uses sort, bash, and parallel. the holy trinity, no cap. 🫶✨

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

  • sort

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🌸🦋 version <pink>20260922</pink>, dated <lavender>2026-09-22</lavender>, wrapped up with so much love. now go sort something enormous and feel like the main character you are. 👑💅✨

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