It's sorting by alphanumerics - ignore the : and the -, and look at the
remaining characters; as far as sort is concerned, the top two lines are
identical.

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 09:12:21AM -0700, O. O. wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>       I am attempting to use the sort command on Linux (2.6), and it does
> not seem to work the way I had expected. I tried various options in
> the man page, but I could not get it to work. Any ideas???
> I first attempted to sort the following file:  (Delimiters are tabs)
> 
> ------------- try_sort.txt ---------------
> a     x       b       c
> a     y       b       c
> a     x       d       e
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> u...@servername:~$ sort try_sort.txt
> a       x       b       c
> a       x       d       e
> a       y       b       c
> 
> This seems OK to me. It seems to get the x’s together and the y’s
> together, which is what I expected. I now changed x’s to be 0-1 and
> the y’s to be 0:1
> 
> ------------- try_sort1.txt ---------------
> a     0-1     b       c
> a     0:1     b       c
> a     0-1     d       e
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> u...@servername:~$ sort try_sort1.txt
> a       0-1     b       c
> a       0:1     b       c
> a       0-1     d       e
> 
> Why is this different from the first case. I only expected x and y by
> the above mentioned values, and it does not seem to sort.
> 
> I would be grateful if someone could help me sort this.
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> O.O.
> 
> > 

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