Hi, All... It might be that the man page for sort needs some polishing. I discovered that in the "-k F[.C],F[.C]" command line argument pair, for fields beyond the first, the first character appears to be the first delimiter character prior to the field. For example,
# cat SortProblem1 ABC 010201 DEF 010202 GHI 020203 JKL 010204 MNO 010208 PQR 010301 STU 010302 # sort -k 2.6,2.7n -k 2.2,2.3n -k 2.4,2.5n ABC 010201 PQR 010301 DEF 010202 STU 010302 GHI 020203 JKL 010204 MNO 010208 See? My understanding of the sort(1) man page is that the keys should have been written as "-k 2.5,2.6n -k 2.1,2.2n -k 2.3,2.4n" to sort on the last two digits of the second field and then on the first two digits of the second field and then on the middle two digits of the second field. I discovered this by compiling the source with the "-g" option and running it through debug and breaking in the "numcompare()" function. Unfortunately, this only seems to work if there is exactly one space between the two fields. *huh* Cheers, Tony Kocurko - Memorial University of Newfoundland _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
