Re: problem with command sort after uniq -c

[Andreas Schwab]

Damien ANCELIN <address@hidden> writes:

> I met a problem with the sort command : I've used the uniq command with
> the -c option to count some numbers, and then applying sort -n don't sort
> lines by numeric order of the first field.
> Here is an example (my sort version is 5.97) :
> $ cat bug_sort | sort -n

This is a useless use of cat, you can just redirect sort's standard
input from the file.

>   1320 51970
>   1692 12345
>  22681 8060
>  26063 8649
>   2668 33603
>   3487 44496
>   4350 23246
>  47013 8000
>   5447 20000
>  81724 5000

I assume that you use the fr_FR locale.  In this locale a number can be
grouped with a space, thus it is considered part of the number.  If you
want to be sure that sort only considers the first field as sort key you
should use -k1,1 to limit it.  The default is to always use the the
whole line as sort key, and sort -n will take as much as possible from
the key to match a number.

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
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