Re: Apparently irrational behaviour in sort

[Eric Blake]

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According to The Wanderer on 12/4/2005 9:56 AM:
> 
> I would suggest that it might be a good idea to provide a more detailed
> explanation of this behaviour in the documentation. From the man page, I
> did not even figure out that "the whitespace between the fields belongs
> to the following field", much less exactly what the -b option would do.
> A more in-depth explanation would have saved me hours of yanking at my
> hair in frustration. If the somewhat abbreviated nature of the man page
> is intentional, then at the least it might be a good idea to provide an
> explanation in the online coreutils FAQ.

Documentation patches are always welcome, if you would like to submit one.

> 
> I might be interested, at least academically, in the reasoning behind
> the decision to make the whitespace part of the following field rather
> than either the preceding one or neither; do you have any idea when the
> discussion which led to that decision might have taken place?

The decision pre-dates GNU sort, as it was the behavior of legacy sort
utilities on early Unix systems.  It was codified into POSIX, so you are
pretty much stuck with that design decision:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/sort.html

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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