However, the second part does work on real shells, just not on bash or csh.
I presume you mean with "real shells", your current favourite shell, "zsh". You are only partially right. You are right that the syntax works, but not the semantics. In 
    file="data1 data2"
    <$file wc -l

[download]
zsh does not give you the number of lines in the files "data1" and "data2". Instead, it gives you the number of lines of the file (singular) "data1 data2". The use of cat isn't going to save the day though, 
    file="data1 data2"
    cat $file | wc -l

[download]
also gives a count of the number of lines in the file "data1 data2".

No doubt zsh has a way of getting the count of lines from both files, after all, zsh is supposed to have every feature under the sun and then some, but it's not <$file.

In reply to Re^7: Sort Large Files by Anonymous Monk
in thread Sort Large Files by Velaki

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