Sorting all the suffixes of a string x = x[1..n] into lexicographical order is the most computationally expensive step in the Burrows-Wheeler Transformation for lossless compression. One tool for achieving a suffix sort is the suffix array. Suffix arrays are also the basis for a variety of compressed text indexing systems that allow arbitrary queries, for example the scheme of Grossi and Vitter.
Citation:
Simon J. Puglisi, William F. Smyth, Andrew Turpin, "The Performance of Linear Time Suffix Sorting Algorithms," dcc, pp.358-367, Data Compression Conference (DCC'05), 2005