On 04/07/2011 01:40 PM, Jyotin Patel wrote: > > Sort does not work on REdhat-AS5 ; it used to work on Redhat AS-3
> [root@cnprodedi01 mail]# cat /etc/redhat-release
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 (Tikanga)
> [root@cnprodedi01 mail]# grep prftp /etc/passwd | sort -n +2 -t':' |
> head -2
> sort: open failed: +2: No such file or directory
Thanks for the report. However, this is not a bug in sort, but a
misunderstanding on your part about changes to sort syntax as POSIX has
evolved over the years. From the NEWS file:
A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
problematic usages. These include:
Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
See also 'info coreutils standards' for information on how to set
_POSIX2_VERSION=199209 for the behavior you were expecting.
But in general, the old +2 syntax should be converted to the newer
POSIX-compliant -k3 (or even the safer -k3,3) instead. Newer coreutils
(the latest is 8.10) added a --debug option, to help in that:
$ echo hi | _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort -n +2 -t: --debug
sort: using `en_US.UTF-8' sorting rules
sort: obsolescent key `+2' used; consider `-k 3' instead
sort: key 1 is numeric and spans multiple fields
hi
^ no match for key
__
--
Eric Blake [email protected] +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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