sort-lines(2)

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NAME

sort-lines - Alphabetically sort lines

SYNOPSIS

n sort-lines

DESCRIPTION

sort-lines alphabetically sorts lines of text in the current buffer from the mark position to the current cursor position. If the buffer mode exact(2m) is enabled then the sort is case sensitive, otherwise the sort is case insensitive. By default the text is compared from left to right from column 0 (the left hand edge), if a positive argument n is given then the text is compared left to right from the nth column, any lines shorter than n characters are moved to the top and sorted from column 0.

EXAMPLE

The following table gives the results of sort-lines for different exact modes and values of n.

_____________________________________________ 

         Original        Sorted Lines 
_____________________________________________ 

  exact     -      n      n      y      y 
    n       -      -      1      -      n 
_____________________________________________ 

            B      a2     B      Aa     B 
            CA     Aa     c      B      c 
            b1     B      b1     CA     b1 
            Aa     b1     a2     a2     a2 
            c      c      CA     b1     CA 
            a2     CA     Aa     c      Aa 
_____________________________________________

NOTES

Typically MicroEmacs '99 is executed with exact(2m) mode enabled, the macro command sort-lines-ignore-case provides a command to sort lines case insensitively while exact mode is enabled. The macro is defined as follows:-

define-macro sort-lines-ignore-case 
    set-variable #l0 &bmod exact 
    -1 buffer-mode "exact" 
    !if @? 
        @# sort-lines 
    !else 
        sort-lines 
    !endif 
    &cond #l0 1 -1 buffer-mode "exact" 
!emacro