On 01/20/2011 11:29 PM, Randall Lewis wrote: > Also, who would've thought that the default "sort" would be incompatible with > "join" and that you would need to write the command like this every time you > wanted to use "join"? > > LC_ALL=C sort test1.txt
No, "sort" and "join" use the same collating sequence by default. It sounds like you have a different problem: you weren't sorting by the same field that you were joining on. For example, if you want to use plain "join" then you need to sort via "sort -k 1b,1". Or, if you want to use "join -t '|'" then you also need to use "sort -k 1,1 -t '|'". This is documented in the coreutils manual. It may be that "LC_ALL=C sort" worked around your problem on your particular test case, but it won't work in general.
