Hi,

I'm trying to use qshell to do a sort of a (non-keyed) DB2 database file to remove duplicate records. I use the following command :-

sort -u /QSYS.LIB/$1.LIB/$2.FILE/$3.MBR | cat > /QSYS.LIB/$1.LIB/$2.FILE/$3.MBR

Where $1 = Library name, $2 = File name, $3 = Member name.

The command does a sort, removing duplicate records, and replaces the data in the original file with the sorted version of the data. This works fine when I try it with a small test file.
When I try this with a larger test file I get the following error in the qshell :-

001-0055 Error found creating file ....... Resource busy.

I'm running this on a machine with plenty of capacity, so I don't think that's an issue here. I think that the cat is starting to write the output before all the input has been read by the sort. Is there a nice way around this without sorting to another file first? Eventually I'll need to use this with some very large files.

I've already tried using a command substitution for the sort :-

$(sort -u /QSYS.LIB/$1.LIB/$2.FILE/$3.MBR) | cat > /QSYS.LIB/$1.LIB/$2.FILE/$3.MBR

But this didn't seem to make any difference.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Martin Gilbert.