RE: different behavior of sort

[Sheila Yao]

Eric:

So it is not a bug? When I use sort -n -k2.1,2.19, it sorts accordingly.

Thanks.
 
Have a nice day,
 
Sheila Yao

-----Original Message-----
From: Andreas Schwab [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 11:23 AM
To: Sheila Yao
Cc: Eric Blake; address@hidden
Subject: Re: different behavior of sort

Sheila Yao <address@hidden> writes:

> sort -n -k2.1,2.4 /tmp/sort.out
> /dev/emcpowera         47G   39G  7.8G  84% /DB1/DW/data9
                ^^^^
The sort key is probably not what you think it is.   I have marked it
for you.  Since the sort key is identical in all lines, sort has used
as a last resort the whole line as the sort key.

>From sort --help:

    POS is F[.C][OPTS], where F is the field number and C the character position
    in the field; both are origin 1.  If neither -t nor -b is in effect, 
characters
    in a field are counted from the beginning of the preceding whitespace.

You should probably just use the whole second field as the sort key.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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