Evan Hunt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> POSIX specifies that that character position (if present) shall be >> positive for the field start spec and non-negative for the field end spec >> (with zero denoting the last character of the field). Thus GNU sort is >> behaving correctly. > > Ah, okay, thanks. > > Bit of a doc problem in "info sort", then: > > `-k POS1[,POS2]' > `--key=POS1[,POS2]' > Specify a sort field that consists of the part of the line between > POS1 and POS2 (or the end of the line, if POS2 is omitted), > _inclusive_. Fields and character positions are numbered starting > with 1. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > ^^^^^^ > > ...so I figured the 0 wasn't supposed to be allowed.
That does not contradict the use of 0 to describe the special case of the _last_ character (which has a varying, non-zero position in every field). > It seems to me that the principle of least surprise would mandate > that .0 in a position spec should either be the equivalent of not > setting a character offset, *or* that it should mean the "zeroth" > character of the field (which would be an error)... There is no such thing as a "zeroth" character in the position counting. For the start field you cannot denote the last character, so using 0 does not make sense. Andreas. -- Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, [EMAIL PROTECTED] SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756 01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5 "And now for something completely different." _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
