Re: bug in sort(1) ?

[Carlo Strozzi]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 05:53:01PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Thanks for the report.  If you had not mentioned Debian I would have
> immediately jumped to the conclusion presented in this FAQ.  But
> Debian does not set LANG by default without the user being informed of
> it and you would be the first to have reported this problem on a
> Debian based system.  And believe me a lot of people have reported
> this required behavior as a problem!

Bob,
thanks for your prompt reply. In fact the "bug" was so evident that
I myself suspected that it must be due to something other than sort,
but I didn't really know where else to look for, especially after having
verified that the older sort worked correctly. Silly me who didn't
do a web search in the first place.

>   
> http://www.gnu.org/software/fileutils/doc/faq/#Sort%20does%20not%20sorting%20in%20normal%20order!

> That really points to a locale problem.  What is the output of the
> 'locale' command in your environment?  This is what I see on my
> Debian system.  None of these are set in my environment and so this is
> showing the default.
> 
>   locale
>   LANG=POSIX
>   LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
>   LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
>   LC_TIME="POSIX"
>   LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
>   LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
>   LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
>   LC_PAPER="POSIX"
>   LC_NAME="POSIX"
>   LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
>   LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
>   LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
>   LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
>   LC_ALL=

Alright, and here's mine:

LANG=en_IE
LC_CTYPE="en_IE"
LC_NUMERIC="en_IE"
LC_TIME="en_IE"
LC_COLLATE="en_IE"
LC_MONETARY="en_IE"
LC_MESSAGES="en_IE"
LC_PAPER="en_IE"
LC_NAME="en_IE"
LC_ADDRESS="en_IE"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_IE"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_IE"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_IE"
LC_ALL=

Of course it was me who set 'LANG=en_IE' in /etc/environment, without
really knowing about possible collateral effects :-). My apologies for
that. Now I set it to POSIX and sort works fine again.

Thanks for your time,
Carlo
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