According to gnu sort -h -u and what you claim to be common practice, a list of possibly redoundant strings, some beginning with a number, is reduced to an ordered set of the numbered strings only.
Since I expect the resulting ordered set to include the original elements, I will then stop using gnu sort to avoid data loss. -------- Original Message -------- On 2/18/25 07:25, Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > On 2025-02-17 15:13, Rupert Gallagher via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote: > > I expect the program to do exactly what the manual says. > > Here's what the manual says about -u in > > <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html#index-uniquifying-output>: > > > Normally, output only the first of a sequence of lines that compare > equal.... > > > > This option also disables the default last-resort comparison. > > > > The commands sort -u and sort | uniq are equivalent, but this > equivalence does not extend to arbitrary sort options. For example, sort -n > -u inspects only the value of the initial numeric string when checking for > uniqueness, whereas sort -n | uniq inspects the entire line. > > This is the part of the manual that you're disagreeing with. The example > in my previous email (an example that you did not reply to) is a > demonstration of this part of the manual. > > I am taking the liberty of closing this bug report, as "sort" is > behaving as documented here. > >
