* Vincent Lefevre: > On 2019-06-26 18:40:50 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote: >> Perhaps the coreutils manual could be improved to make this all clearer, and >> perhaps it should refer to the Debian manual if it doesn't already. > > In this case, there should be a new ordering option to provide > true numeric sort with strings mixing non-negative integers and > characters.
There's no one true numeric sort. Some versioning schemes interpret numbers after a dot as decimal fractions (so that 1.9 > 1.10), but it's more common to split version strings into tuple somehow and then sort the non-numeric parts lexicographically, and the numeric parts as integers (so that 1.9 < 1.10). Thanks, Florian
