sort records by fields with sort

I just found a very neat little jewel of a use for the unix sort command. Apparently you can use sort with the -t option and specify fields like so:

cat onlyequipment.txt | sort -t"|" +2 > onlyequipment.sorted.txt

Given this command sort will sort the records of file onlyequipment.txt based on the 3rd field of the pipe delimited field such as:

38320|E|STENTM|20100518|1445|CYSTOM|30||
4871|E|US/BX|20100617|0800|US/BX|45||
40359|E|CYSTM1|20100726|1530|CYSTOM|30|
29566|E|STENTM|20100414|0945|CYSTOM|30||
45995|E|US/BX|20100830|1315|US/BX|30|||
44196|E|US/BX|20100609|0800|US/BX|45||3
18699|E|STENTM|20100621|0830|CYSTOM|30||4 WKS C
35816|E||20100805|0800|CYSTOF|0||1Y - F
40880|E||20100316|0815|CYSTOF|0||6 M CYSTO|100316
41071|E|CYSTM1|20100721|1445|CYSTOM|30||3WK PER BLOI
24512|E|US/BX|20100421|0800|US/BX|45||TRUS BX-GIVE

so after the file has been sorted and piped into the file you will get this:

40880|E||20100316|0815|CYSTOF|0||6 M CYSTO|100316
35816|E||20100805|0800|CYSTOF|0||1Y - F
41071|E|CYSTM1|20100721|1445|CYSTOM|30||3WK PER BLOI
40359|E|CYSTM1|20100726|1530|CYSTOM|30|
29566|E|STENTM|20100414|0945|CYSTOM|30||
18699|E|STENTM|20100621|0830|CYSTOM|30||4 WKS C
24512|E|US/BX|20100421|0800|US/BX|45||TRUS BX-GIVE
44196|E|US/BX|20100609|0800|US/BX|45||3
4871|E|US/BX|20100617|0800|US/BX|45||
45995|E|US/BX|20100830|1315|US/BX|30|||

Pretty neat huh.