bug#51011: Problem solved - thoughts on confusing behavior

[Juncheng Yang]

Thank you, Paul! :) 
In my test, the -k option of the sort on Mac behaves differently from GNU sort 
(I made a mistake stating -n). In other words, 
printf '%s\n' 1,a 0,9 | sort -nk1 -t ,
works on Mac, and this is why I thought GNU sort has a bug at first. 
Thank you again for your quick response! The GNU tools (and 
maintainers/contributors) are really amazing! 


Best, 
Juncheng 


> On Oct 4, 2021, at 4:01 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 10/4/21 08:29, Juncheng Yang wrote:
>> However, this is confusing because 1) the behavior of `-n` and `-g` are not 
>> consistent
> 
> Yes, that is confusing. I have followed up to Pádraig about this.
> 
> , 2) the `-n` in GNU sort is different from the sort on MacOS (which has pos2 
> as pos1+1 instead of 0)…
> 
> GNU sort does that too; that's old-fashioned syntax that is not recommended 
> nowadays; it's better to use the -k option. macOS 'sort' supports supports -k 
> too, surely.