Re: sort -t: -k1 behaves strangely

[John Cowan]

Eric Blake scripsit:

> Did you mean to use -k1,1 instead of -k1?  Otherwise, you are stating that
> the key begins with the first field, but continues through the end of the
> line (with the field separators ignored), and since ' ' comes before '#',
> the output looked correct to me.  Using -k1,1 swaps the line to list #2 first.

Ah, thanks.  Unfortunately, this is documented only on the info page,
not on the man page or "sort --help".  Adding "or EOL if omitted"
to those two sources would be very helpful.

I've probably never noticed the difference before, because I usually
sort tab-delimited rather than colon-delimited files.

-- 
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