Gentlemen, We have RedHat Linux, v.6.1 installed on an Intel Pentium 3 system. The Linux 'sort' filter is behaving substantially differently from the 'sort' on a separate adjacent UNIX platform. The Linux 'sort' acts as if it had -d and -f options set, but 'sort' is not in any alias, and executing '/bin/sort' to bypass any system modification does not change the performance. In a nutshell, 'sort' acts as if it is case independent and non-alphanumeric sensitive during the sort process, but the display and printout preserves all characters. In this sort, the following records in a file: BEEP exam _aaa ZZZ zzz q w a s d f g 1 2 3 ! @ # A S D E W Q R __Q __r 4 2 __3 in the Linux sort becomes sequenced as: ! @ # 1 2 2 __3 3 4 A a _aaa BEEP D d E exam f g Q __Q q R __r S s W w ZZZ zzz which differs from the normal UNIX sort output of : BEEP ZZZ _aaa exam zzz ! # 1 2 2 3 4 @ A D E Q R S W __3 __Q __r a d f g q s w As you can see, the Linux 'sort' ignores blanks, underscores, and case while doing its thing, although these items are in the final output. Also, each lower case letter lead character follows immediately after its upper case brother, unlike the usual collating order where all uppercases, together, precede the lower cases, as in the UNIX list above. Also, the at-siogn, @, in the Linux sort comes between the exclamation and the pound, but in UNIX, it is between the numerics and uppercase alphas. We have tried to find what collating sequence file, LC_COLLATE, but cannot make sense out of these data files and their associated directories in /usr/share/locale/... We would appreciate your help, because many of our script modules use 'join' processes, which are extremely sequence order dependent. It seems strange that we have not seen anything on this anomalous 'sort' anywhere until it hit us hard during our migrating a large collection of UNIX shell scripted modules over to Linux. Thank you for your assistance, Dr. Leonard Spialter ____________________________________________________________________ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape WebMail account today at http://home.netscape.com/webmail _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils