sort -g bug

[Seemant Kulleen]

Hi,

There's a bug in all coreutils versions higher than 5.0; essentially,
sort -g on a file larger than 25 MB (I tested on a 50MB file -- cat'd
/usr/share/dict/words onto itself 10 times).  All the memory gets eaten
up and all the swap gets eaten up, slowing the machine to a crawl. 
Regular sort seems to work fine (after a bit of slowdown), but sort -g
is relentless and just eats memory/swap.

The other bug is explained here: 
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44403

The patch there is a very simple one, and seems to be ok for us (note
that we do apply the i18n patch that's distributed at i18n.org).

Thanks,
-- 
Seemant Kulleen
http://dev.gentoo.org/~seemant

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