Re: Bug in "sort 2.0"

[Ruy Exel]

 > Cc: address@hidden
 > From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
 > Date: 01 Nov 2000 18:10:31 +0100
 > Lines: 35
 > User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7
 > 
 > address@hidden (Ruy Exel) wrote:
 > | I think I found a bug in "sort 2.0".  It is folding lower case to
 > | upper case characters even if the -f option is not present.  In fact
 > | it does not seem possible to make it act as is the -f option is
 > | absent.  Below you will find the transcript of a shell session in
 > | which the bug appears.
 > 
 > 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.

Hi Jim,

Thanks very much for your message.  I have followed your advice and
have solved my problem satisfactorily.  Nevertheless, assuming you
have a say in future versions of SORT, may I suggest that an option be
included so that SORT would adopt the standard ASCII ordering
regardless of environment variables.

Thanks again,
Ruy Exel