Re: Sort: Is this a bug or not?

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Miklos Janosi <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 16:20:15 -0500
> 
> I have a file to sort that contains no colons ":"....
> 
> sort -t: -k1.3,1.14 -k1.32,1.35 -k1.26,1.31 -k1.15,1.25 -o xx.srt xx
> cut -c3-14,32-35,26-31,26-31,15-25 xx.srt > yy
> cut -c3-14,32-35,26-31,26-31,15-25 xx | sort > zz
> diff yy zz
> 
> If I understand correctly, yy and zz should be the same, but they are
> not. Is this a bug in sort or am I mistaken on my parameters?

It's not necessarily a bug.

There are a few possibilities that might explain the problem.  For
example, in some locales the collation order is defined on entire
strings, and it's possible for "A" < "B" and "C < D" but "BD" < "AC".

Of course, it might be a bug anyway, so it's worth investigating.

What is the output of the following shell commands on your host?

  locale
  uname -a
  sort --version

Can you supply some test data to illustrate the bug, so that we can
reproduce it?