High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Sort/Merge utility is a mainframe program to sort records in a file into a specified order, merge pre-sorted files into a sorted file, or copy selected records. Internally, these utilities use one or more of the standard sorting algorithms, often with proprietary fine-tuned code. It is very frequently used; often the most commonly used application program in a mainframe shop. Modern sort/merge programs also can copy files, selecting or omitting certain records, summarize records, remove duplicates, reformat records, and produce reports.