DSXchange

yiminghu-

this is an excerpt from the AIX sort MAN pages:

-u
Suppresses all but one line in each set of lines that sort equally according to the sort keys and options.

Could you explain how this does not get rid of duplicate records? If you don't believe it, try it.

For the original poster, do a "cat -v" of the result to see if there might not be nonprintable characters in the string.