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The
and functions are implementations of radix sort. These functions sort
an array of pointers to byte strings, the initial member of which is referenced
by The byte strings may contain any values; the end of each string is
denoted by the user-specified value Applications may specify a sort order
by providing the argument. If must reference an array of + 1 bytes which
contains the sort weight of each possible byte value. The end-of-string byte
must have a sort weight of 0 or 255 (for sorting in reverse order). More
than one byte may have the same sort weight. The argument is useful for
applications which wish to sort different characters equally, for example,
providing a table with the same weights for A-Z as for a-z will result in
a case-insensitive sort. If is NULL, the contents of the array are sorted
in ascending order according to the order of the byte strings they reference
and has a sorting weight of 0. The function is stable, that is, if two
elements compare as equal, their order in the sorted array is unchanged.
The function uses additional memory sufficient to hold pointers. The
function is not stable, but uses no additional memory. These functions
are variants of most-significant-byte radix sorting; in particular, see D.E.
Knuth’s Algorithm R and section 5.2.5, exercise 10. They take linear time relative
to the number of bytes in the strings.
Upon successful completion
0 is returned. Otherwise, -1 is returned and the global variable is set
to indicate the error.
The value of the element of is not 0 or
255. Additionally, the function may fail and set for any of the errors
specified for the library routine
The
function first appeared in 4.4BSD.
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