[cldr]

It's not really boilerplate in the classical sense, he's just talking about headers and lines that have only a brace on them. I think it's a fair statement.

Plus, he could have reduced lines even further to get down to about 6, like

   vector<string> data;
   string line;
   for (ifstream ifile(argv[1]); getline(ifile, line);)
       data.push_back(line);
   sort(begin(data), end(data));
   copy(begin(data), end(data), ostream_iterator<string>(ofstream(argv[2]), "\n"));

And his `return 0` was superfluous so I removed it.

Unfortunately we work with iterator pairs in C++; if we had ranges like D does, we could turn those last two into

   copy(sort(data), ...)

but alas we cannot.

[alpatters]

You could use boost::range to make it even more succinct