Re: Weird behaviour (possibly bug) of sort

[Pádraig Brady]

On 16/03/10 10:29, Kilian Hekhuis wrote:
> Dear coreutils maintainers,
> 
> I have found very weird behaviour in GNU sort on Linux (coreutils 7.4),
> and I'm wondering if it's me doing something wrong, or whether there's a
> bug in there.
> 
> I have this input file:
> 20       6      1234XX
> 12       10     1234XX
> 14       13     1234AA
> 
> 
> I would like to sort on the third column first, then on the second column,
> but numerical, not ASCII. I figured this should do it:
> 
> sort -k3,3 -k2,2n inp.txt
> 
> However, the result comes out wrong:
> 
> 14       13     1234AA
> 12       10     1234XX
> 20       6      1234XX

The soon to be released --debug option
illustrates that the leading spaces are used
which causes an issue for you as the third column
will have varying numbers of spaces.

$ sort --debug -k3,3 -k2,2n ~/inp.txt
14       13     1234AA
           ___________
         __
______________________
12       10     1234XX
           ___________
         __
______________________
20       6      1234XX
          ____________
         _
______________________

If you add the -b option you should be sorted (pardon the pun).

cheers,
Pádraig.