Re: Does sort handle -t / correctly

[Peng Yu]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 04/17/2015 11:03 AM, Peng Yu wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> On 04/17/2015 10:10 AM, Peng Yu wrote:
>>>> Hi, I got the following results when I call sort with -t /. It seems
>>>> that 'a/1.txt' should be right after 'a'. Is it the case? Or I am not
>>>> using sort correctly?
>>>
>>> Your assumption is correct - you are using sort incorrectly, by failing
>>> to take locales into account, and by failing to limit the amount of data
>>> being compared to single field widths.
>>
>> Thanks for the explanation.
>>
>> If I don't know the number of fields, but I want to sort according to
>> all fields (from 1 to whatever the max number of fields), is there a
>> way to do it?
>
> No one has really asked for that before.  Are you going to propose some
> possible extension syntax to make it obvious how to generate as many key
> specifications as necessary to fully cover an arbitrary number of fields
> in a line?

Since no -k options means treat each line just a whole string, maybe
one can allow -k without specifying any columns as treating each line
as all the set of fields in that line?

-- 
Regards,
Peng