Re: sort command

[Bob Proulx]

Robert Lewis wrote:
> Some of my shell scripts are now failing with SuSE 9.0.
> Prior to 9.0 the sort command would put anything starting with
> -Doug
> at the top, the - (dash) being the item of interest.  This has worked
> on Unix etc as well as Linux until now.q
>
> Now the - is being ignored and the letters following the dash are used
> for the sort.

Thank you for your report.  However this is almost certainly not a bug
in sort.  It matches one of the FAQs, which by definition are asked
frequently!  :-)

  
http://www.gnu.org/software/fileutils/doc/faq/core-utils-faq.html#Sort%20does%20not%20sort%20in%20normal%20order!

This is due to the fact that you or your vendor have set environment
variables that direct the program to use locale specific sorting
tables which do not sort as you expect.  You or your vendor have
probably set environment variables like LANG, LC_ALL, or LANG to
en_US.  There appears to be a problem with that table on some systems
which is not part of the GNU program but part of your vendor's system
release.

Unset them, and then set LC_ALL to POSIX.

       # If you use bash or some other Bourne-based shell,
       export LC_ALL=POSIX
     
       # If you use a C-shell,
       setenv LC_ALL POSIX
     

and it will then work the way you expect because it will use a
different set of tables.

See the standards documentation for more information on the locale
variables with regards to sort.

  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/sort.html 

Bob