Joe asks how to sort a file with long records. <plug> Likely the best way is with our Suprtool product. We use our own sort routines that have the advantage of: 1. Using 1/2 the scratch space that HP's routines do, 2. Sort about 20% faster, and 3. Allow sorting of longer records (as of MPE/iX 3.0 the limit in HP's sort routines was 8192-byte records, but this may have changed in subsequent versions of MPE/iX). </plug> BTW, I'm not certain why Joe gets this specific error. He mentioned that HP's routines are in CM. When I did extensive timing and testing of HP's routines, I'm 99% certain that while sort.pub.sys is a CM program that calls the CM sort intrinsics, they in turn just do a cm/nm switch to the native-mode routines. Thus all sorts are really in NM, although there could be some restrictions for CM programs that first call the CM routines. Cheers, David <[log in to unmask]>