Re: strange 'sort' behaviour

[Eric Blake]

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Please keep replies on the list, so that others may chime in or learn from
the discussion.

According to Eric Stockman on 1/9/2008 4:37 AM:
| dear Eric ,
| Thanks a lot for the quick reply .
| I added  an " export LC_ALL=POSIX "  in  my .bash_aliases file and now
| "sort" works as expected.
| I still don't understand why . I'm using the English version of Ubuntu
| see  the next extracts from 'env'
| ---
|  PWD=/home/eric
|  LANG=en_US.UTF-8

That's exactly why.  As the FAQ explained, different locales have
different collation (sorting) rules.  It is the LC_COLLATE env-var (which
defaults to LANG, but is overridden by LC_ALL) that controls this
particular aspect of sort's behavior.  And the en_US.UTF-8 collation rules
prefers a dictionary sort (where certain punctuation characters compare
equal) over the byte-wise value sort (which is what you get with the C
locale; note that I generally use the identical LC_ALL=C as it is less
typing than LC_ALL=POSIX).

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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