multi-threaded sort

Question

Is there a multi-threaded version of the standard sort command? I'm looking for something that would take as input a maximum number of threads to use, possibly a given amount of RAM, plus the standard sort options, and just run.

Answer 1

The sort command was parallelized in coreutils-8.6 which was released on 2010-10-15. Here's the commit where it was added:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=9face836f36c507f01a7d7a33138c5a303e3b1df

However, I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 which is still on coreutils-8.5. I don't know when the new sort will make its way into most distros.