Field sort

OK, this idea goes WAY back to when things were done from a DOS command line, (-; and there were some sort apps that were called as "filters" that took the output from one source, sorted it, and then passed it on.

There was one in particular that was a very unique "field sort" where your fields could be specified in two different ways. The most common way of course was fixed position fields relative to the start of the record. The big difference was that you could also specify your fields by their relative position in the record based on a user-specified field delimiter. And if your record format permitted it, you could even mix the two field definitions. Obviously this only worked if you had fixed position fields at the start of the record which were followed by relative position fields.

In addition to defining each field, you had a whole bunch of options that you could use to denote how each field was to be sorted.

Ascending/descending is obvious; but you also could specify various forms of date, time, and things like whether the field was left or right justified (important with numerical data with variable length fields).

You could also ignore case and/or use a different sort table if you wanted to.

It was an extremely versatile program, especially when you consider that it was written over 25 years ago. I've seen one very expensive commercial program that is similar but not quite as good.

Thanks

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OK, it turns out that I didn't understand the purpose of this forum which is to suggest existing apps that might be converted to portable ones.

What I was suggesting was a new app since the only approximation to the old sort filter I was describing is an expensive product, not an open source or freeware one.

So I guess I'm back to wishful thinking again