General :: Merging And Sorting Multiple Files With "sort"?

I have a bunch of text logfiles in the following format:

ID (17 characters)
Timestamp (14 characters YYYYmmddHHMMSS e.g. "20060210100040" -> 2006/02/10 10:00:40)
Random data (? characters)
end of line

The files are already sorted by timestamp.I need to get 1 log file with all the logs from multiple logs files, sorted by timestamp. Note that the log files are really huge, around 3-4G each (and there are dozens of them) I tried the following command:

sort -s -m -t '|' -k1n,1n +17 -o data_sort.txt *.TXT

Here is how I ended up with this command:

-s : don't bother with tie results
-m : merge all logs files
-t '|' : there is no | in my logs, so the whole line should be field 1

[code]....

Actually... it fails miserably. The output file data_sort.txt is just the concatenation of all files, not sorted at all.