Postman's Sort

Postman's Sort is a LINEAR TIME general purpose file sorting program for PC compatible computers. Incorporating this program in your applications can save you time, money and guarantee high performance in your applications that do sorting.

• Typically two to four times as fast other sorting programs. For example, a file of 100,000 records each 180 bytes long can be sorted in 4 seconds on a 200MHz Pentium Pro.
• Runs standalone or called from another program
• No limit on file size
• Fixed, Variable, and Data Delimited file types
• Field types accommodated include alphabetic, signed and unsigned binary, packed decimal, ascii numeric, ieee floating point among others.
• Flexible and Natural specification of sorting fields and collating sequences from command line or command file.
• All versions exploit all available system memory to minimize sorting time.
• Can be used as a standalone sorting utility, called from another program, called as a subroutine or called as a co-routine.

The Postman's Sort is especially useful on LARGE files where time saved is the greatest.

• Articles and Links
  • C/C++ Users Journal - August 1992
    This is the original article that inspired the creation of this commercial product.
  • PCWeek - August 1997
    This article compared the Postman's Sort and other sorting programs for NT. My disappointment with the results of some of the tests on large files inspired me to undertake improvements in algorithms used for large files. The current version is 3 times faster than the one used for tests in this article.
  • Microsoft research report - August 1997
    This report describes a new metric for sorting - the penny sort. Postman's sort won a medal for this one.
  • Sorting Benchmark Webpage. This page has been maintaied over the last several years by Jim Gray at Microsoft Research's Bay Area Research Center
• History
• Documentation
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• Comments and Testimonials
• Latest News:
  Postman's sort wins April 2005 Pennysort benchmark. Review report here

Versions are available for DOS, Windows 3.1, Win/95/98/NT, OS/2 and UNIX.