Awk and sort (of text files)

[Michael Hennebry]

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, jd1008 wrote:

>> Personally I tend to use a nontexty character for this kind of 
>> placeholder, such as ^G. Less risk of excountering that in the input 
>> text, and therefore less risk of accidentally mangling it.

Eliminate risk.
Replace all strings of e's with another string of e's, one e longer.
Replace the intra-paragraph newlines with one e each.
Sort.
Undo the previous replacements.
If, for some reason, one does not like e, use a vertical stroke.

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"SCSI is NOT magic. There are *fundamental technical
reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young
goat to your SCSI chain now and then."   --   John Woods