Re: bug in sort?

[Jim Meyering]

Robert Citek <address@hidden> wrote:
| I was working with sort and noticed that I got some errors when string
| lengths were multiples of 16.  Here's a bash script to demonstrate the error:
|
| ( c="x"; list=""; length=0
|   for length in $(seq 1 48); do
|     echo "length == " ${length}
|     list=${list}${c}
|     echo -ne "${list}~\n${list}\n" | sort
|   done )
|
| The line with the tilde (~) should always be second.  However, when
| ${length} is some multiple of 16 and ${c} is not in [a-zA-Z], then the line
| with the tilde is first.  I've tried up to ${length}=1024.
|
| The system is a RH7.0 box using sort (GNU textutils) 2.0e written by Mike
| Haertel.  I looked for updates on the RedHat site but did not find any.

Thanks for the report.
I haven't heard of that bug before.
In any case, it doesn't appear to be a problem in the latest test release:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/textutils-2.0.14.tar.gz