Bug in sort?

[Henk M. Keller, AT Computing BV]

Sirs,

I can not explain the behavior of the command "sort" as demonstrated in the
following typescript:

======== Start of typescript
Script started on Wed Jan 10 12:52:48 2001
demo$ uname -a
Linux pantarhei.ATComputing.nl 2.2.14-5.0 #1 Tue Mar 7 21:07:39 EST 2000 i686 
unknown
demo$ ls -l /bin/sort
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        27632 Feb  7  2000 /bin/sort
demo$ sort --version
sort (GNU textutils) 2.0a
Written by Mike Haertel.

Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
demo$ cat >demo-in
2
1
4
3
5
demo$ sort -n demo-in
5
1
2
3
4
demo$ exit
Script done on Wed Jan 10 12:53:27 2001
======== End of typescript

Numeric sorting seems to succeed only if *all* the numbers are preceeded by
whitespace (but this is just an impression).

Hardware: LeoDesign 300MHz Pentium II, 128MB
The sort command has *not* been recompiled, the version used is the one
supplied with Mandrake 7.2.
An older sort, "sort - GNU textutils 1.14" on a FreeBSD system, seems to
sort correctly.

Greetings from the Netherlands,
-- 
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Henk M. Keller - AT Computing, P.O. Box 1428, NL-6501BK Nijmegen
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