BIBSORT 1 "08 October 1999" "Version 0.14" [section 4 of 11]

OPTIONS

For the sort order options beginning -by, the last one seen overrides all earlier ones.

All options are parsed before any input bibliography files are read, no matter what their order on the command line.

Except for the options described below, command-line words beginning with a hyphen are assumed to be options to be passed to sort(1).

The leading hyphen that distinguishes an option from a filename may be doubled, for compatibility with GNU and POSIX conventions. Thus, -author and --author are equivalent.

All remaining command-line words are assumed to be input files. Should such a filename begin with a hyphen, it must be disguised by a leading absolute or relative directory path, e.g. /tmp/-foo.bib or ./-foo.bib.

The sort(1) -f option to ignore letter case differences is always supplied. The -r option reverses the order of the sort. The -u option removes duplicate bibliography entries from the input stream; however, such entries must match exactly, including all white space.

Sort keys are constructed from several parts of the BibTeX entry. If non-numeric values are found where numbers are normally expected (that is, for BibTeX day, number, pages, volume, and year, keys), they are replaced by large integers that will sort higher than any reasonable integer value likely to be present. Nondigits after the first character are ignored, so 20S will reduce to 20: such values are occasionally seen for volume, number, and pages values.

However, uncertain year values of the form 19xx or 20xx are sorted at the end of their century.

-?

Give a brief help message on stdout, process all further options, but exit with a successful status code (on UNIX, 0) before processing any files.

-author

Give an author credit on stdout, then process all further options, but exit with a successful status code (on UNIX, 0) before processing any files.

-byday

This option is intended for use with bibliographies of publications containing day, month, and year data, such as technical reports, newspapers, and magazines. It causes entries to be sorted by year, month, day, and citation label, so that the entries appear in their original publication order.

With -byday sorting, a day keyword is recognized (it will be standard in BibTeX 1.0), but for backward compatibility, month entries of the form

"daynumber " # monthname
"daynumber~" # monthname
{daynumber } # monthname
{daynumber~} # monthname
monthname # "daynumber "
monthname # "daynumber~"
monthname # {daynumber }
monthname # {daynumber~}

are also recognized, and will yield both a day and a month. If a day number is not available, a very large value is assumed, which will sort the entry after others that have day values in the same year and month.

-bypages

This option is intended for use with journal article bibliographies. It is similar to -byvolume, except that the issue number is ignored: thus, it causes entries to be sorted by journal, year, volume, page, year, and citation label, so that the entries appear in their original publication order. The journal name is included in the sort key, so that in a bibliography with multiple journals, output entries for each journal are kept together.

The reason for ignoring the issue number is that some journal databases lack that information. If -byvolume were used, then articles lacking issue numbers would be sorted separately from those with issue numbers, which makes it harder to check for duplicates, or to compare entries with original journal issues.

-byseriesvolume

This option is intended for use with bibliographies of series, such as Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Only the volume number and citation label are used in preparing the sort key.

-byvolume

This option is intended for use with bibliographies of single journals. It causes entries to be sorted by journal, year, volume, number, page, year, and citation label, so that the entries appear in their original publication order. The journal name is included in the sort key, so that in a bibliography with multiple journals, output entries for each journal are kept together.

With -byvolume sorting, warnings are issued for any entry in which any of these fields are missing, and a value of the missing field is supplied that will sort higher than any printable value.

Because -byvolume sorting is first on journal name, it is essential that there be only one form of each journal name; the best way to ensure this is to always use @String{...} abbreviations for them. Order -byvolume is convenient for checking a bibliography against the original journal, but less convenient for a bibliography user.

-byyear

If this option is given, then the entry year value is prefixed to the sort key, so that sorting is first by year, then by citation label. This is useful for keeping a bibliography in approximate chronological order, ordered by citation label within each year.

-copyright

Give a brief copyright message on stdout, then process all further options, but exit with a successful status code (on UNIX, 0) before processing any files.

-help

Give a brief help message on stdout, then process all further options, but exit with a successful status code (on UNIX, 0) before processing any files.

-version

Give a brief version number message on stdout, then process all further options, but exit with a successful status code (on UNIX, 0) before processing any files.