I can't reproduce this on any machine.
Are you sure it's not just what it says, out of memory?

It turns out that the bug is the usage of

sysconf (_SC_AVPHYS_PAGES);

which returns a number which may not be available to a single
process on a 32bit system with 4GB RAM. In my case, 
it returns 3.8GB. It is the total free memory on my machine.
But it is the usable memory for a single process.

I am using a patch like this. It seems to work on my 4GB machine.


--- textutils-2.0.11/src/sort.c.mem     Sat Feb  3 13:31:56 2001
+++ textutils-2.0.11/src/sort.c Sat Feb  3 13:35:59 2001
@@ -630,7 +630,9 @@ default_sort_size (void)
 {
   /* Set sortalloc to 50% of available memory, unless it overflows.  */
   double mem = physmem_available ();
-  sortalloc = min (mem, SIZE_MAX);
+  /* Roughly, we may not use more than 1/3 of the adddress space in
+     a single process on Linux even if more memory is available.  */
+  sortalloc = min (mem, SIZE_MAX / 3);
   sortalloc >>= 1;
 
   if (sortalloc < SORTALLOC_DEFAULT_MIN)

This defect is considered MUST-FIX for Florence Release-Candidate #1

Should be fixed in textutils-2.0.11-4.  Thanks for the patch!