"Joseph A. Wiencko, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > "there exists no collating sequence in which this should be the > behavior of comm -- it is contrary to the basic, stated behavior of > comm REGARDLESS OF THE COLLATING SEQUENCE".
This misunderstands the specification of comm. The coreutils documentation says: Before `comm' can be used, the input files must be sorted using the collating sequence specified by the `LC_COLLATE' locale. <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_mono/coreutils.html#comm-invocation> The POSIX documentation says the same thing in a different way: If the lines in both files are not ordered according to the collating sequence of the current locale, the results are unspecified. <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/comm.html> These specs make it clear that if you give `comm' unsorted input, `comm' is entitled to do whatever it pleases (short of looping or dumping core; the GNU coding standards wouldn't allow that). It doesn't matter whether there is an alternative universe in which the input was actually sorted. Personally I think `comm' should print a diagnostic if the input is unsorted. I'd welcome a patch along those lines, if it didn't slow down `comm' too much in the normal case (that's the hard part :-). _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
