Re: sort not sorting right?

[Bertram Franz]

Bob,

thanks a lot for your answer. You were right, LANG=en_US.UTF-8 on all 
these systems, and that is propagated to all the other LC vars. 
Unsetting or setting to POSIX helped. So after all this is a bug in the 
en_US collation table, maintained by SuSE or Novell?

Anyway, I will now include LC_COLLATE=POSIX in all machine's profiles ...

Thanks again.

Bertram

> Bertram Franz wrote:
>  
>
> > I have an issue with sort. A file
> >    
>
> Thanks for the report.  It is most appreciated.  However it matches a
> very common problem signature which is not usually a bug in sort.  (Or
> ls either.)
>
>  
>
> > A:B
> > A:F
> > AC:B
> >
> > is, in my eyes already sorted correctly. When running it through sort 
> > (no options), it comes back with
> >
> > A:B
> > AC:B
> > A:F
> >
> > Somehow it acts as if -d was specified, but it wasn't. I experimented 
> > with the -t : option, no success.
> >    
>
> It sorts according to your 'locale'.  What is the output of the locale
> program on your system?  Some locales are dictionary sort order where
> case is folded and punctuation is ignored.
>
>  locale
>
>  
>
> > How can I sort a file without ignoring colons, or tabs, or spaces?
> >
> > I tried on different machines with
> > textutils-2.0.14-2 (RHES 2.1)
> > coreutils-5.2.1-31 (Fedora Core 3)
> > coreutils-5.2.1-32 (SuSE 9.2)
> >    
>
> The systems you mention above are probably setting LANG without your
> knowledge by default.  (I wish they would not do that.)
>
>  
>
> > On an HP-UX machine I get the desired result ...
> >    
>
> HP-UX does not set LANG by default.  I am sure your local there is C
> or POSIX giving you a standard environment there.  Run 'locale' to
> check.
>
> This is an FAQ.  Here is a semi-standard reply:
>
> Try this and then try your test again.
>
>  unset LANG
>  export LC_ALL=POSIX
>
> Please read this faq, look for "Sort does not sort" for the entry in
> question.
>
>  http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/
>
> See your system and other standards documentation for how it reacts in
> the presence of locales.
>
>  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/sort.html
>
> Hope that helps,
> Bob
>
>