join fails on numerically sorted key fields?

[sd]

Greetings,

After much hair-pulling I have discovered what seems to me bizarre (or at least 
anti-intuitive) behavior of join: apparently, numerically sorted keys cause 
join to fail, silently.

Given two files:

file1.txt:
50
100
200
300

file2.txt:
90
100
200
300

join file1.txt file2.txt

yields no result (!)


Whereas:

file3.txt:
100
200
300
50

file4.txt:
100
200
300
90

join file3.txt file4.txt

yields:
100
200
300


Unless I'm missing something (environment variables?), it appears that 
numerically sorted keys are ignored by join.

I am running join (textutils) 2.0 under Mac OSX 10.3.9 and join (textutils) 
2.0.21 under cygwin.

This appears to be the same problem discussed by Jorge Infante on 11 August.

It would be quite helpful for me if if I could use join with numerically sorted 
key fields, without having to alpha sort the files on the key fields, perform 
join, then numerically resort the files on the key fields

Many thanks if any ideas!


Sean DALY
address@hidden