While Unix folks are discussing how cool is Unix
    compared to MS things for this task, I've made a humble
    attempt to solve it.

It hasn't been JUST that.  After all, a large number of the unix tools have
been ported to the windows environment, so it's just a matter (maybe) of
finding the right tool and environment, and putting up with a bit of
unix-like syntax...

Or, perhaps it's more of "Handling sorting of data larger than available RAM
memory has been a fundamental problem of data processing since the dawn of
computers.  Any "sort" PROGRAM (as opposed to a function) OUGHT to be able
to deal with this, although finding one that handles 3G in reasonable
timemight be a bit of a challenge."  (For this reason, it's relatively
common for programs that need to sort large amounts of data to make
"external" calls to the system sort utilities, rather than writing code from
scratch each time.  One of my first programming jobs involved porting such a
function (the API to call the system sort utilities) from fortran II on a
GE4020 to Fortran4 on an IBM370...

BillW

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