Re: sort does not use tab as delimiter

[DI Oliver Maurhart]

>> The question is solely: does sort support it or not. And
>> currently it simply doesn't. That's all.
> 
> Several people have already posted examples showing that quoting tab
> for use with sort as a delimiter does work okay.
> Totally wrong. Several people have already posted examples showing how
to pass on tabs on a shell/terminal to a progie not capable of quoting.
>
> That's *not* the same, don't you see that?

To be more precise: the term "pain ass on a shell" didn't state, that it
is impossible to do. This is a Unix world, therefore there are a lot of
possibilities out there.

Some of the comments were pretty cool ($'\t'), some of them not (<ctrl>-v).

However, none of them showed a direct standard solution to "sort" but
rather demonstrated deep knowledge to yet another application ("bash",
"emacs") doing things in a non-standard fashion to overcome the
shortcomings of "sort". None of these had indeed addressed "sort" directly.

BTW: the noun "standard" imposes legal acts to be enforced by legal
bodies based on global/national contracts. There's a keen difference
between "standard", "specification", "best practice" and others in the
current realm of perception.

My first post hold a solution (which - I confess - wasn't that
comprehensive, but showed a way to go) directly enforced on "sort"
making some bash-magic-mumbo-jumbo obsolete and "sort" itself more
powerful and - alongside - even more user friendly independent of the
current shell, keyboard driver or Window Manager (for god's sake!) ...
which can be viewed as an increase of software quality. Something which
is thought to be "good", isn't it?

To sum up the stated above:

- "sort" still has shortcomings in my point of view and I would be
pleased to see something done about it directly.

- Yes, there are ways to overcome these shortcomings.

- But, No, none of these ways hold a 100% "silver bullet" at that
quality level a built-in solution based on standards would have.


The whole matter is *not* a bug report but a feature request.


O.

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