On 02/26/2011 11:28 AM, Betty J Barr wrote: > I have used the "unix" sort for years without trouble, but suddenly > something weird is happening. I have a student whose last name is Khan, > and a student whose last name is Khanal,. The comma immediately follows > the last name. Obviously Khan should be sorted before Khanal, both from > the English standpoint and based on the ASCI code for a comma. But it is > not. Khanal comes first. Why?
Because you are using a locale that regards punctuation as insignificant in collation sequences. See this FAQ, then try 'LC_ALL=C sort ...' to see the difference. http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/#Sort-does-not-sort-in-normal-order_0021 Also, newer coreutils (the latest is 8.10) includes 'sort --debug' to help diagnose problems like this. -- Eric Blake [email protected] +1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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