bug in sort?

[Robert Citek]

Hello,

I was working with sort and noticed that I got some errors when string
lengths were multiples of 16.  Here's a bash script to demonstrate the error:

( c="x"; list=""; length=0
  for length in $(seq 1 48); do 
    echo "length == " ${length}
    list=${list}${c} 
    echo -ne "${list}~\n${list}\n" | sort
  done )

The line with the tilde (~) should always be second.  However, when
${length} is some multiple of 16 and ${c} is not in [a-zA-Z], then the line
with the tilde is first.  I've tried up to ${length}=1024.

The system is a RH7.0 box using sort (GNU textutils) 2.0e written by Mike
Haertel.  I looked for updates on the RedHat site but did not find any.

HTH,
- Robert