On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Damien ANCELIN wrote:
I met a problem with the sort command : I've used the uniq command with the -c
option to count some numbers, and then applying sort -n don't sort lines by
numeric order of the first field.
Here is an example (my sort version is 5.97) :
$ cat bug_sort | sort -n
1320 51970
1692 12345
22681 8060
26063 8649
2668 33603
3487 44496
4350 23246
47013 8000
5447 20000
81724 5000
You don't say which locale your environment is configured to use for
sorting, but I'd bet it's one which treats whitespace differently to how
you expect.
With only spaces between the 2 fields, sort -n read 1 number per line
and use it to do the sort : 2668 33603 is read as 266833603. With this
consideration, the result of sort is correct, but it's not what I
expected (and I didn't see this behaviour in the documentation).
The command "sort -n" treats the whole line as the sort key. Specifying
"sort -k1,1n" will use just the first field, in ascending numerical
order.
Cheers,
Phil
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