[ale] sorting large delimited text files

[PBoyington at polyengineering.com (Preston Boyington)]

I have some text files that I need to sort.  Each file is (roughly) 2200 pages (134,000+ rows) of comma delimited text.

the text looks like so:
2117496.796445,882112.506031,483.908997

I have tried to import these into OOo (1.0.4) and Excel (2000) spreadsheets, but keep hitting their limit on row count (32000 for OOo and about 65000 for Excel).

Most likely I will have to sort the files by the third column / number (initially at least).

How else can I sort these files quickly?

Thanks,
Preston