Re: mistake in sort -k argument processing?

[Andreas Schwab]

Evan Hunt <address@hidden> writes:

> Observation:
>
>     $ sort -k1.0,2
>     sort: character offset is zero: invalid field specification `1.0,2'
>
> Now, this seems unnecessary to me; it *could* silently ignore the ".0" and
> treat it as if you hadn't specified a character offset.  (SCO does that.)
> But, regardless, if that *is* going to be an error, then shouldn't this:
>
>     $ sort -k1,2.0
>
> ...be an error as well?  It isn't.

POSIX specifies that that character position (if present) shall be
positive for the field start spec and non-negative for the field end spec
(with zero denoting the last character of the field).  Thus GNU sort is
behaving correctly.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
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