---
name: "parsort"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "parallel"
version: "20260922-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/parsort"
---

# parsort(1)

Sort (big files) in parallel

## NAME

parsort - Sort (big files) in parallel

## SYNOPSIS

**parsort** *options for sort*

## DESCRIPTION

**parsort** uses GNU **sort** to sort in parallel. It works just like **sort** but faster on inputs with more than 1 M lines, if you have a multicore machine.

Hopefully these ideas will make it into GNU **sort** in the future.

## OPTIONS

Same as **sort**. Except:

- **--parallel=***N*

  Change the number of sorts run concurrently to *N*. *N* will be increased to number of files if **parsort** is given more than *N* files.

## EXAMPLE

Sort files:

```
  parsort *.txt > sorted.txt
```

Sort stdin (standard input) numerically:

```
  cat numbers | parsort -n > sorted.txt
```

## PERFORMANCE

**parsort** is faster on files than on stdin (standard input), because different parts of a file can be read in parallel.

On a 48 core machine you should see a speedup of 3x over **sort**.

## AUTHOR

Copyright (C) 2020-2026 Ole Tange, http://ole.tange.dk and Free Software Foundation, Inc.

## LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or at your option any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.  If not, see \<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/\>.

## DEPENDENCIES

**parsort** uses **sort**, **bash**, and **parallel**.

## SEE ALSO

**sort**