Re: sort bug??

[Bob Proulx]

> Shouldn't sort without options sort by byte value? It seems to
> skip leading white space. This is on mandrake 7.2 which IMO has
> some other strange quirks.

Thanks for the report.  It matches a common pattern.  This is not due
to a bug, but to the fact that you or your vendor have set environment
variables that direct the program to use locale specific sorting
tables which do not sort as you expect.  You or your vendor have
probably set environment variables like LANG, LC_ALL, or LANG to
en_US.  There appears to be a problem with that table on some systems
which is not part of the GNU program but part of your vendor's system
release.

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 it will then work the way you expect because it will use a
different set of tables.

See the standards documentation for more information on the locale
variables.

  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/sort.html

Bob