title: Sort lots of large compressed files
body: <p>I have a lot of large compressed files called xaa.gz, xab.gz, xac.gz etc.  Unfortunately they are not sorted.  I would like to do the equivalent of the following.</p>
  
  <pre><code>zcat x*|sort &gt; largefile
  
  split -l 1000000 largefile
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then gzip the split files and throw away all the other files made before as well.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is this makes a massive uncompressed file  and then lots of smaller uncompressed split files before then compressing them. Is it possible to do the whole thing without making a huge file in the middle of the process and ideally without saving the split files before compressing them either?</p>
  
  <p>I have 8 cores so I would like to take advantage of them too (I don't have coreutils 8.20 so can't take advantage of sort --parallel). </p>