bug#6972: bug in sorting floats

[Eric Blake]

[forwarding on your mail to the list, to close this out]

On 09/02/2010 11:55 AM, saddy wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. In my last mail some spaces have been lost, so
> now indeed it is line 5 to sort.

The spaces were gone before your original mail hit my inbox.  From the 
mail headers of your original mail, I see you use Thunderbird:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US;
        rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100713 Thunderbird/3.0.6

which has a known issue where pasting text or replying to a prior email 
can result in Tbird eating spaces prior to words starting with <, >, and 
&.  That's probably the explanation.

> I've found out that it has been my fault. I have locale de_DE.UTF-8,
> therefore sort is assuming ',' for floats. With en locale it's working
> fine.

Ah, an issue with locales.

And yes, the new 'sort --debug' tries to make locale issues obvious, 
since that's the first thing it outputs:

> > $ sort --debug -k6g test.txt
> > sort: using `en_US.UTF-8' sorting rules

Glad to know it's not a bug.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org