Collin Funk wrote: > I imagine many of those times the only purpose of 'sort' was to make > sure that 'join' worked since it requires the field being joined on to > be sorted right?
Correct, that was one motivation to use 'sort'. The other one was to remove duplicates, because I did not know of an easy way to remove duplicates in O(N log N) time without sorting.[1] Bruno [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2024-03/msg00098.html
