I'm not sure why you are using sort/skip. It seems to me, if date is the first column of each record (line), you could use sort without refinements. To sort on only the first character of a series of strings, use: sort/compare f func [a b] [a/1 > b/1] BTW you didn't really have a space between SORT and /SKIP did you? - Michael Jelinek -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2000 12:59 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [REBOL] problem with sort a file Hello, I tried to sort a file in a reverse order according to the date, which is the first column of the file. e.g foo.txt looks like this: 1-Feb-2000 bla bla bla 9-Feb-2000 bla bla bla 3-Feb-2000 bla bla bla .. My script is : file: read/lines %foo.txt file2: sort /skip file 4 write/line %foo2.txt file2 The output file foo2.txt looks as same as foo.txt, it didn't sort at all. Can anyone tell me what's the problem? BTW, How can I sort the date in reverse order: sort/compare %foo.txt func [a b] [a > b] only sort the first character instead of the whole date expression. Can I combine these two processes together? Thank in advance. Tiana
