London Computing LSORT

This page displays an up-to-date listing of changes to our customer support web. We'll also place notices here regarding product updates, scheduled releases, or problems and work arounds that may affect all customers. When bugs reported by our customers get fixed, we'll place a notice here, along with an estimate of when the fix will be shipped.

Saturday April 18, 2009

LSORT has been upgraded to version 4.21.
LSORT now uses a new install process. You should manually uninstall versions older than 4.20 before installing LSORT421.
LSORT421 is a 32 bit executable, but has been tested on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Microsoft Windows.
This version of LSORT fixes a problem in the previous version that caused LSORT to fail when the GUI interface was used in 64 bit versions of Vista or Windows 7.
This version of LSORT fixes a problem in the ISSORTED utility that caused it to indicate that a file was not sorted properly if it contained an emtpy line followed by a line that started with a TAB character.
This version of LSORT fixes a problem in the LSORT utility that caused it to attempt to fail when running under 64 bit versions of Vista or Windows 7.
London Computing has a new address. The LSORT programs have been modified to show the new addresss.

Friday April 25, 2008

LSORT 4.20 is now available.
LSORT now uses a new install process. You should manually uninstall older versions before installing LSORT420.
LSORT 4.20 now supports multiple threads. You must use the -T flag to use multiple threads. LSORT sets the number of threads to use to the number of cores in your processor (e.g. LSORT uses 2 additional threads when using any dual core processor and uses 4 additional threads when using a quad core processor. (It has not been tested with the AMD X3 processor, nor has it been tested with more than 4 cores.)
LSORT threading does not work well on Intel P4 processors with hyperthreading. Use single threading for these CPUs.
Input files can now be larger than 2GB.
dBase II and dBase III files are not supported in this release since so few people use these files anymore. The support is still in the program and may still work. If you need it and there is a problem, let me know and I will attempt to fix it.
A new GUI is available using Microsoft Windows .HTA files. The GUI is installed as part of the LSORT package.
The object files for LSORT are no longer distributed with the package. They are distributed with the source. You must register and make a contribution to receive the source, but you can contribute less than the suggested amount.
LSORT now can be run using a Stable sorting algorithm. (In a stable sort, records with the same sort key are returned in the same order that they appeared in the input file.)
The restart function is no longer supported in this release, however it is still available if you wish to try it. (It hasn't been tested with the new sorting engines.)
The default stable sort algorithm requires more RAM than the two other options (Heap and Quick sort), but performs better.
LSORT is distributed with a utility, ISSORTED, that you can use to verify that a file is sequenced properly. See ISSORTED.txt for more information.
LSORT is distributed along with a SORT filter, LSRTNT.EXE. See LSRTNT350.txt for more information.
LSORT must be installed in the c:\Program Files\LSORT420 directory.
LSORT may create a directory named: C:\LSORTWORK which will be used to store work files when a file is too large to sort in memory. It also holds the (unsupported) restart file (SORTPARM.DAT) as well as a LOG file, LSORTNT.LOG. Up to 99 versions of LSORTNT.LOG and SORTPARM.DAT will be stored in this directory. These files can be deleted if desired.

Monday July 16, 2007

A new version of LSRTNT has been posted which contains bug fixes for dealing with delimited files.

Monday Feb 17, 2007

LSORT4.06 will fail under Microsoft Vista if it needs to create merge files. LSORT defaults to creating merge files in the C:\ directory, which is locked out by Vista. There is a simple work around (needed for Vista only, XP, Windows 2000 are not affected). Create new environment variables: LSORTWORK1 and set it to %temp%, LSORTWORK2 and set it to %temp% You can create environment variables from the System Control Panel and clicking the Advanced link. A new version of LSORT that has been recoded using Microsoft’s safe C library will be posted shortly. This versions will fix the Vista issue. It adds a new sorting algorithm that supports stable sorts and multiple threads.

Monday Nov 24, 2003

LSORT 4.06 has been placed online, corrects a setup problem.

Monday June 12, 2000

LSORT 4.05 has been placed online. This package contains revised versions of LSRTNT.EXE and LSORTNT.EXE with enhanced support for delimited files. The new versions allow using special characters as delimiter characters. You can use \t for tab characters, \n for linefeed, \r for return, \a for alarm and \xxx for decimal character xxx.

Sunday Oct. 3, 1999

version of LSRTNT.EXE. This is a bug fix. The older versions would not work reliably if data was piped into LSRTNT from another program. This was corrected with the new version.

Thursday, May 6, 1999

LSORT 4.04 has been placed online. This package contains several options making it easier to embed LSORT into other applications, fixes for some Y2K issues and the additon of the modified LSRTNT described below.

Tuesday, April 20, 1999

New version of LSRTNT, 32 bit sort filter for Windows 95/98/NT. This new version was modified to make it easier to embed LSRTNT into other applications by supressing messages and prompts.

Monday, April 19, 1999

Customer support web placed on-line. LSORT 4.03 is available for download.

Tuesday, January 5, 1999

LSORT 4.03 released. This is a bug fix release. Modifications were made to the installer only to resolve problems with the Windows front end on systems running Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98.

Sunday, January 4, 1999

LSORT 4.02 released. This modification included the addition of several year 2000 compliant date fields to those fields known by LSORT. This is a Y2K update release.

Monday, June 15, 1998

LSORT 4.00 released. This version of LSORT was developed for the Windows 32 bit environment only. It is the first version to include tight integration between the Windows front end and the command line sort engine.DOS, Windows 3.x and OS/2 versions of LSORT have been frozen.