Dear coreutils maintainers, I have found very weird behaviour in GNU sort on Linux (coreutils 7.4), and I'm wondering if it's me doing something wrong, or whether there's a bug in there.
I have this input file: 20 6 1234XX 12 10 1234XX 14 13 1234AA I would like to sort on the third column first, then on the second column, but numerical, not ASCII. I figured this should do it: sort -k3,3 -k2,2n inp.txt However, the result comes out wrong: 14 13 1234AA 12 10 1234XX 20 6 1234XX Although the third column is sorted the way I want, the second isn't: 6 should come before 10. So I tried something slightly different: sort -n -k3,3f -k2,2 inp.txt But no such luck: though the 'f' triggers ASCII sorting, it also somehow prevents the second -k receiving the global -n. Then I tried to switch the columns in the input file: 20 1234XX 6 12 1234XX 10 14 1234AA 13 And what do you know? Both "-k2,2 -k3,3n" and "-n -k2,2f -k3,3" produce the right, expected output: 14 1234AA 13 20 1234XX 6 12 1234XX 10 I'm a bit lost here, as this is behaviour that is certainly not documented, and I would think this is a bug. Best regards, Kilian Hekhuis
