Need help understanding sort tests

[Andy Jewell]

In the test suite for sort (coreutils 6.9), there are two tests that  
seem to be testing for incorrect behavior.

I'm hoping someone will help me understand why the behavior in the  
test is correct.

Here are the commands, and the expected output. (The tests are 10f and  
10g).


sort -t : -k 1.3,1.3
:ba
:ab


sort -k 1.4,1.4
b ba
a ab


In both of these cases it seems that the explicit -k matches an empty  
string, which would compare equal, so it would fall back to the last  
resort memcmp of the whole line, which would produce the opposite  
ordering from above.

So what am I missing?


many thanks,
adj