Different Sorts Information

DFSORT is a sort product sold by IBM.
SYNCSORT is a competing product sold by Syncsort, Inc.
CA-SORT is yet another sort product, sold by Computer Associates.

Obviously, most shops only buy one of these products.

ICEMAN is just another name (entry point) used for the sort program. It's common practice in shops for the system programmers to set up all the common names as entry points to their purchased SORT product. You will often find that PGM=SYNCSORT and PGM=DFSORT will both work in your shop, and both execute the same sort program (whichever one your shop purchased).

ICETOOL is an expansion to the basic SORT program, that allows you to use alternate (simpler) commands to do multiple sort operations in a single sort step. I think that ICETOOL doesn't do anything that you couldn't do via coding multiple DFSORT steps -- it just makes coding them a bit easier.

ICETOOL is supplied as part of the basic SORT package -- if you have DFSORT, you also have ICETOOL. Many people don't seem to realize this. And some troglydite managements don't understand this, and forbid use of ICETOOL in production, restricting programmers to only SORT steps. Such managements are fools (but, alas, not uncommon).

SYNCTOOL is Syncsort, Inc.'s version of the ICETOOL package.

All these are very similar products -- they all do basic sorting. And they use similar commands. For most basic sort operations, the same commands will work in all the products. When you get into more advanced functions, there are some differences between them -- some functions are only offered in one or the other product, and sometimes different syntax is used for the same operations.