2010-01-28, 09:40(-08), DennisW: > On Jan 28, 8:43 am, Guido Milanese <guido.milan...@unicatt.it> wrote: >> I am facing a problem concerning SORT on a Linux Ubuntu 9.04 >> distribution. >> I noticed that the -f option seems not to work. This is an example: >> DOG >> CAT >> zebra >> dog >> ZEBRA >> mouse >> >> Running "sort" on the file I get: >> CAT >> dog >> DOG >> mouse >> zebra >> ZEBRA >> >> Running "sort -f " I get the same result. No problem of encoding, being >> plane letters <127 -- to be sure I saved the list as 'test', and "file >> test" says it's a pure ASCII text. Without the '-f' option, 'sort' used to >> distinguish among lowercase / uppercase. >> Is this a bug or a new behaviour of 'sort' ? [...] > This has little or nothing to do with Bash. > > Try this: > > LANG=C sort
Not guaranteed to work, in this case it's the LC_COLLATE part that matters. The LC_COLLATE variable takes precedence over LANG, and LC_ALL over LC_COLLATE, so: LC_ALL=C sort is guaranteed to work as nothing has precedence of LC_ALL. It does have the side effect to also change the LC_MESSAGES setting and therefore the language of sort's error messages (but setting LANG could have that effect as well). There's no easy work-around that. You could do things like: ( set -a eval "$(locale)" unset LC_ALL LC_COLLATE=C LC_CTYPE=C exec sort file ) You've got to have the same LC_COLLATE as LC_CTYPE otherwise the behavior is unspecified, and if you reset LC_CTYPE, then the error messages may be displayed in the right language, but not the right character set. That localisation thing is not really well designed IMO. -- Stéphane
