Sorry for cowering behind a pseudonymous email address, but I have the same given names as certain famous people in professions related to mine and wish to avoid confusion. Moreover such fame and identity as I have is tied to the delightful creature, the woodchuck, after which I am pseudonamed.
Perhaps this is cowardly in certain nations more closely associated with their former or present colonial Masters than my own; I should concede that the genetic stock of such places might facilitate a deeper understanding of criminality and cowardice than does that in a land peopled through free will and whose folk's liberty was at one point established by force of that will, instead of confounding one's Masters with a dreary stew of sycophancy, beggary, stultification, boredom, servile coarseness and expense. That said, consider the following: I have transposed the output to rows for ease of study. For these examples, ascii collating order and numeric collating order are by coincidence the same. cat testfile 16.88 16.54 15.12 15.00 14.57 sort testfile 14.57 15.00 15.12 16.54 16.88 ascii CORRECT sort -n testfile 14.57 15.00 15.12 16.54 16.88 numeric CORRECT sort -nr testfile 16.88 16.54 15.12 15.00 14.57 numeric reversed CORRECT sort -k1 testfile 14.57 15.00 15.12 16.54 16.88 ascii CORRECT sort -k1n testfile 14.57 15.00 15.12 16.54 16.88 numeric CORRECT sort -k1nr testfile 16.88 16.54 15.00 15.12 14.57 incorrect reversed numeric FAILURE In this example, f(i) >= f(i+1) (reverse numeric sort) is not true. 15.00 !>= 15.12 Note that the integer part is sorted correctly. Add some more 15.nm to the testfile to see more detail. Do I misunderstand the man 1 sort entry concerning -k? I suspect that attribute "n" is not working for -k. Dave the Cowardly Marmot
