msort 8.52-1.3 source package in Ubuntu

 msort is a program for sorting files in sophisticated ways. It was originally
 developed for alphabetizing dictionaries of "exotic" languages, for which it
 has been extensively used, but is useful for many other purposes. msort differs
 from typical sort utilities in providing greater flexibility in parsing the
 input into records and identifying key fields and greater control over the
 sort order. Its main distinctive features are:
 .
  o Msort can be used as a command-line program or via a graphical user
    interface that is helpful not only to those who find a complicated command
    line difficult to deal with but also to those unfamiliar with the finer
    points of sorting.
  o Records need not be single lines of text but may be delimited in a number
    of ways.
  o Key fields may be selected by position in the record (counting from the
    beginning or the end), by character ranges (e.g. the key consists of the
    fourth through eighth characters), or by matching a regular expression to
    a tag.
  o For each key an arbitrary sort order may be specified. Msort also
    understands locales.
  o For each key an effectively unlimited number of multigraphs (sequences
    of characters to be treated as a single unit for purposes of sorting,
    "collating elements" in Unicode parlance) of effectively unlimited length
    may be defined.
  o In addition to the usual lexicographic and numerical comparisons, msort
    supports hybrid lexicographic-numeric comparison (for things like filenames
    and section headings, so that, e.g., 2a will precede 10b), random
    comparison, and ordering by angle, date, time, month name, domain name,
    email address, ISO8601 date-time, and string length.
  o Numbers may be in just about any known number system, e.g. Chinese or
    Devanagari.
  o For each key a distinct set of characters may be excluded from
    consideration when sorting in any combination of initial, final, and
    medial position in the key field.
  o For each key a distinct set of regular expression substitutions may be
    defined. These provide the means to make names like McCarthy sort before
    MacCawley, as if McCarthy were spelled MacCarthy as well as to handle the
    rare cases in which a single character is treated for purposes of sorting
    as a sequence, such as German "eszet" sign, which is traditionally sorted
    as if it were ss.
  o Lexicographic keys may be reversed, allowing the construction of reverse
    dictionaries.
  o Any or all keys may be optional. For optional keys, the user may specify
    how records missing the key field should compare to records in which the
    key field is present.
  o A choice of sorting algorithms with different properties is provided.
 .
 msort understands UTF-8 Unicode. Unicode may be used anywhere that text is
 entered: in the text to be sorted, in sort order and exclusion definitions,
 as a field or record separator, or as a field tag. Full Unicode
 case-folding is available.

 msort-gui is a frontend for msort utility. It is helpful not only to those
 who find a complicated command line difficult to deal with but also to
 those unfamiliar with the finer points of sorting.