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Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,
From: |
Gabriel Gaster |
Subject: |
Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t, |
Date: |
Tue, 8 Oct 2013 18:10:23 -0500 |
Thank you both very much for your detailed responses. I've responded below.
I would also like to ask that an example calling attention to this be put in
the man pages. While the warning to use LC_ALL=C that is already there is
helpful -- an explicit example that shows numeric sort acting differently would
shed more light on this.
--
gabriel gaster
On Tuesday, October 8, 2013, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Also note that while some of the sort funcionality is awkward,
> it's done like that for backwards and cross compatibility reasons.
That makes sense. I suppose you mean in particular that sort relies on tables
specified by the locale?
On Tuesday, October 8, 2013, Eric Blake wrote:
> Yes, it's a FAQ:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#Sort-does-not-sort-in-normal-order_0021
> and sort is doing what POSIX behaves for your particular machine's
> definitions of locales, and in turn their description of how collation
> and numeric parsing will perform in that locale. Except for the C
> locale, different vendors have tended to have different rules, even for
>
> locales that are otherwise named the same.
Thanks for the FAQ, which I found very helpful. Then the question in my mind
remains: if a user specifies a field-separator shouldn't that override the
locale? In this case, `en_US.UTF-8' allows the comma character in numerics,
however specifying that the comma character is a field-separator should mean it
does not allow the comma in numerics.
It seems that the locale overrides specific arguments to sort (in this case,
field-separator=, ). From the FAQ, I understand this might be necessarily so,
given how sort is implemented with reference to the locale tables. Still
though, why isn't sort faithful to an argument given to it?
- question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Gabriel Gaster, 2013/10/08
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Eric Blake, 2013/10/08
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Pádraig Brady, 2013/10/08
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Eric Blake, 2013/10/08
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Gabriel Gaster, 2013/10/09
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Gabriel Gaster, 2013/10/09
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Eric Blake, 2013/10/09
- Re: question about behavior of sort -n -t,, Gabriel Gaster, 2013/10/09