You have sort/merge utility job scripts written for a VMS environment, and are looking for familiar interface and equivalent functionality when migrating to an 'open systems' platform like Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, Linux or Windows.
Solutions:
CoSort's Sort Control Language (SortCL) program, at the suggestion of DEC in the early 1990s, adopted some of the semantic structure of the VAX VMS sort/merge utility. For this reason, VMS users are quite comfortable working, and expanding their functional possibilities, in SortCL. Many of the keywords and parameter conventions are the same, but IRI has introduced many functional and performance innovations in the last 15 years to the commercial Unix (and Windows) sort market.