bug in Linux 'sort'

[Leonard Spialter]

Gentlemen,

We have RedHat Linux, v.6.1 installed on an Intel Pentium 3 system.

The Linux 'sort' filter is behaving substantially differently from the 'sort'
on a separate adjacent UNIX platform.

The Linux 'sort' acts as if it had -d and -f options set, but 'sort' is not in
any alias, and executing '/bin/sort' to bypass any system modification does
not change the performance.

In a nutshell, 'sort' acts as if it is case independent and non-alphanumeric
sensitive during the sort process, but the display and printout preserves all
characters.

In this sort, the following records in a file:
  BEEP
  exam
  _aaa
  ZZZ
  zzz
  q
w
a
s
d
f
g
1
2
3
!
@
#
A
S
D
E
W
Q
R
__Q
__r
4
2
__3

            in the Linux sort becomes sequenced as:
!
@
#
1
2
2
__3
3
4
A
a
  _aaa
  BEEP
D
d
E
  exam
f
g
Q
__Q
q
R
__r
S
s
W
w
  ZZZ
  zzz

          which differs from the normal UNIX sort output of :
  BEEP
  ZZZ
  _aaa
  exam
  zzz
!
#
1
2
2
3
4
@
A
D
E
Q
R
S
W
__3
__Q
__r
a
d
f
g
q
s
w

          As you can see, the Linux 'sort' ignores blanks, underscores, and
case while doing its thing, although these items are in the final output.
Also, each lower case letter lead character follows immediately after its
upper case brother, unlike the usual collating order where all uppercases,
together, precede the lower cases, as in the UNIX list above.
Also, the at-siogn, @, in the Linux sort comes between the exclamation and the
pound, but in UNIX, it is between the numerics and uppercase alphas.

We have tried to find what collating sequence file, LC_COLLATE, but cannot
make sense out of these data files and their associated directories in
/usr/share/locale/...

We would appreciate your help, because many of our script modules use 'join'
processes, which are extremely sequence order dependent.

It seems strange that we have not seen anything on this anomalous 'sort'
anywhere until it hit us hard during our migrating a large collection of UNIX
shell scripted modules over to Linux.

Thank you for your assistance,

Dr. Leonard Spialter








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