Re: sort doesn't sort

[Jim Meyering]

address@hidden writes:
| I was using sort to try to sort our news active file (over 60,000 lines)
| and sort produced no errors, but did not properly sort the file.
|
| Sample small section out of order:
| ab.jobs
| a.blackbox.wo-men
| ab.misc
| abolition.caucus
| abo.pryltorg
| ab.politics
| abq.for-sale

You are using the version of sort that comes with textutils-2.0
or newer and have reported a problem whereby it is sorting in
some non-ASCII order.

That is due not to a bug in sort, but to the fact that you have
set environment variables that direct sort to use improper locale-
specific tables (you or your vendor have probably set environment
variables like LC_ALL to en_US).

You should set LC_ALL to POSIX

  # If you use bash or some other Bourne-based shell,
  export LC_ALL=POSIX

  # If you use a C-shell,
  setenv LC_ALL POSIX

and then sort will work the way you expect.