> Alas, I don't think this works with the standard Unix tools. It kind of works with standard unix tools. cut -d$'\37' -f ... sort -t$'\37' -k ...

> Alas, I don't think this works with the standard Unix tools. It kind of works with standard unix tools. cut -d$'\37' -f ... sort -t$'\37' -k ... join -t$'\37' ... Those will parse ASCII-31-separated fields. But records are still newline separated, no way to change that AFAIK, short of running everything through tr '\036' '\n' first. Which defeats the purpose of choosing "weird" delimiters in the first place. (Also note that the $'\..' syntax is bash-specific and doesn't exist in POSIX sh.)