Re: Linux sort problem

[Jim Meyering]

Leonard Spialter <address@hidden> writes:
| 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.

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 LANG, LC_ALL, or LANGUAGE to en_US).

Unset them, and then 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 sort will then 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.