TV_SORT(1)

📦 version 1.4.0, in alpine 3.24

💖 NAME 💖

okay so bestie, this is tv_sort — the lil tool that sorts your XMLTV listings files by date and adds in the stop times for you ✨ (it's a user-contributed Perl thing, so you know it's got range 💅)

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tv_sort [--help] [--by-channel] [--output FILE] [FILE...]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: it reads XMLTV data and writes out that exact same data, just sorted in date order. That's it, that's the whole main character energy 👑

And where the stop times of programmes are missing? It literally guesses them from the start time of the next programme on the same channel 🌸. But bestie, hear me — for the last programme of a channel, no stop time can be added. None. Nada. Not possible 😭

tv_sort also does some sanity checks while it's in there, like making sure no two programmes on the same channel overlap. Very "vibe check the timeline" of it, no cap 💀

  • --output FILE — writes to FILE instead of standard output 📝
  • --by-channel — sorts first by channel id, then by date within each channel 🎀
  • --duplicate-error — if the input contains the same programme more than once, this considers that an error 🔥. The default is to silently ignore duplicate entries (much more chill of it, ngl)
  • --help — you know what this does, queen 🫶

The time sorting goes by start time, then by stop time. Without --by-channel, if start times and stop times are equal then two programmes get sorted by internal channel id. With --by-channel, channel id gets compared first and then the times. Order of operations, iconic 💜

You can think of tv_sort as converting XMLTV data into a canonical form — which is lowkey so useful for diffing two files 👑

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

At a typical Unix shell or Windows command prompt:

tv_sort <in.xml >out.xml
tv_sort in.xml --output out.xml

These are literally different ways of saying the same thing, iykyk 💅

🌸 AUTHOR 🌸

Ed Avis, ed@membled.com — give her a follow, she ate 💖

and that's the whole page bestie, ty for coming to my TED talk 🧚 this one's perl v5.42.2, dated 2025-06-30, so go forth and sort those listings 🌟💖

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