behaviour of sort command

[PleegWat]

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On 01/20/2012 10:57 PM, Dan Christensen wrote:
> Is this a bug in sort?  It's not explained in the man page or the
> info page, and I think most people would expect that adding text to
> the end of unequal lines shouldn't change their sort order.

How sort sorts depends on your localization settings (specifically the
value of LC_COLLATE). Example:

$ LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
$ echo -e " 1\n_1\n 2\n_2" | sort
 1
_1
 2
_2
$ LC_COLLATE=C
$ echo -e " 1\n_1\n 2\n_2" | sort
 1
 2
_1
_2

Typically LC_COLLATE=C corresponds to sorting the actual byte order.

See `man locale`

PleegWat
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