Alternative to "sort" in unix ?

[Richard S. Freedman]

   I am looking for advice on either speeding up the unicos sort utility
or a good alternative.  I am spending a lot of time (but not memory)
using unicos "sort" to order a large database - about 5 to 7 E6 entries.
Under the old XMP I was able to use "tuning" parameters in sort to greatly
speed up the sort.  This seems to be impossible in unicos, and the sort
utility never seems to use much memory, only a lot of time.  Would
using a C routine, or even fortran, be faster ?

  thanks for any advice,

  Richard Freedman