aww

I've been trying to do a single &(*^ sort operation for two hours (class on command-line tools for bioinformatics), kept running into all sorts of different errors, and when it didn't error the files were empty, and when the files weren't empty they were truncated... what finally made it work was piping output to STDOUT and then STDOUT to a file, since for some reason making it go directly to the file wouldn't work

@bobble Welcome to the world of random obscure computer bugs, we hope you enjoy your stay

The fix would probably be throwing in a line to the effect of "wait until sort finishes before writing" or checking that the sort loop ended properly.

but again, speculation

It was a command-line tool and I didn't want to delve into terminal scripting torture

valid, terminal scripting is the worst