bug#51011: [GNU sort] Numerical sort with delimiter may be broken (bug)

[Pádraig Brady]

tag 51011 notabug
close 51011
stop

On 04/10/2021 15:36, Juncheng Yang wrote:
> Hi coreutils developers,
>      I have encountered a bug in GNU sort in which sort produces incorrect 
> results when numerical sort with delimiters. For example,
> sort -nk1 -t , file
> cannot sort the a file with the following lines (sort by the first column 
> numerically)
> 1,a
> 0,9
>
> I have tried multiple version including the latest version, this problem still 
> exists.

The --debug option points out the issue:

  $ printf '%s\n' 1,a 0,9 | sort --debug -nk1 -t ,
  sort: key 1 is numeric and spans multiple fields
  1,a
  _
  ___
  0,9
  ___
  ___


So you want -k1,1n

cheers,
Pádraig