Re: join fails on numerically sorted key fields?

[Andrew D Jewell]

Recently, there was work done on a binary search utility, which might 
be called 'look'. In the process, the code for the command line 
parsing and complex comparisons of sort were separated out into 
library functions.

In theory you could use this and get all the power of sort's 
comparison functions with a relatively small amount of work.

adj

>  > It would be quite helpful for me if if I could use join with
> >  numerically sorted key fields, without having to alpha sort the
> >  files on the key fields, perform join, then numerically resort the
> >  files on the key fields
>
> Yes, that would be a nice feature to add.  Perhaps you could write
> the code and documentation?  The behavior should be consistent
> with that of sort -n and/or sort -g, and should use similarly-named
> options.
>
> Of course join can't sort numerically by default, because that would
> break existing scripts and POSIX doesn't allow it.  See
> <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/join.html>.
> But it sort numerically if you pass it an option.