Re: Support bytesize comparison in sort

[Paul Eggert]

Mart Somermaa <address@hidden> writes:

> - the implementation is simple, effective and 2^n/10^n-problem agnostic
> (at the cost of comparing 100000K less than 1M, which is not a problem
> as we assume the input to be properly scaled).

That's the cost that I'm worried about.  The input is not always
"properly scaled".  Even GNU 'du' does not always "properly scale"
numbers in the sense that you're describing, since it sometimes says
"1001k" and sometimes "1.0M".  In general, if sort ignores the
distinction between powers-of-2 and powers-of-10, the output will be
wrong sometimes.