, 1 min read
Unix sort Issue
Original post is here eklausmeier.goip.de/blog/2018/02-13-unix-sort-issue.
I wondered why Unix sort
behaved strangely.
printf "A0 1\nA 1\n" | sort
delivered
A0 1
A 1
Of course, I expected A to come before A0. This was strange, as printf "A1 1\nA 1\n" | sort
produced
A 1
A1 1
just as expected. Also, printf "A0\nA\n" | sort
orders A before A0, as expected.
Solution: Use LC_ALL before sort. So
printf "A0 1\nA 1\n" | LC_ALL=C sort
delivered
A 1
A0 1
I realized this when I called sort
with --debug
flag,
printf "A0 1\nA 1\n" | sort --debug
which shows the empleyed locale:
sort: using ‘en_US.UTF-8’ sorting rules
A0 1
____
A 1
____
To check that my expected sort-order was indeed the "right" order, I wrote the following simple Perl-script to sort, which confirmed my understanding of ASCII sorting:
#!/bin/perl -W
use strict;
my @F = <>; # slurp
for my $i (sort @F) { print $i; }