text file column processing

This is a simple application that will open a list of text files. From each text file, the application will find a specified column, sort the column on an index (also in the file), and output the column to a new file. The index column and some documentation columns will also be output to the file. The application must be in gnu c++ and use code that will compile on either windows (under cygwin gcc3.4), or on linux. Since I do allot of this kind of thing, the project will also involve developing a "columns" class where an object is created for each column of data (class definitions and member functions for loading, etc). I would like this part of the code to be re-usable to the greatest extent practical. There will be additional projects where statistics are calculated on the data in the output file. ## Deliverables The text files that are processed are output by an existing program (stats4). I have attached a copy of that program. The stats4 program accepts a file name, and then processes all files in pwd with the extension .in.txt. The output files have the extension .out.txt. I have attached a .zip with a set of the files that are processed by stats4. By running stats4, you can create a set of the files that will be used as input for the new application. I have also attached a sample of the output file I would like and a readme with more specific documentation. This application may not make use of proprietary libraries, or any code which is licensed by a third party, with the exception of gnu compiler and runtime libraries and windows runtime libraries.