Re: sort bug reappeared

[Jim Meyering]

"Geoffrey S. Knauth" <address@hidden> writes:

| Last winter I reported a bug with `sort', which thinks this is correct:
|
| AARDVARK
| ,ABLE
| CHARLIE
| ,DOG
|
| whereas I think this is correct:
|
| ,ABLE
| ,DOG
| AARDVARK
| CHARLIE
|
| I was referred to an RPM (2.0a), which fixed the bug.  Now the bug is
| back in sort version 2.0e.

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.
-----------

BTW, in recent textutils test releases, sort --help output
includes this:

  *** WARNING ***
  This version of sort honors the locale settings in your environment.
  For example, if you set one of the LANG or LC_ALL environment variables
  to `en_US', then sort will work very differently than most people expect.
  If that's not what you want, then set LC_ALL to POSIX in your environment.