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up vote 8 down vote favorite
1

Consider the following input to sort:

cat > foo <<EOM
D,,5014978
DD,,25
D,I,1972765530
D,Y,4223624
-,Y,71285059
YA,I,2
EOM

Now try running sort foo

The output is not sorted when trying this on any of my linux boxes (gnu coreutils versions 6.9-7.4). The output is sorted when run under cygwin (gnu coretuils 8.5). Comments?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Sorting depends on the locale; specifically, it depends on $LC_COLLATE (possibly overridden by $LC_ALL), falling back to $LANG if it doesn't exist. The command locale will show you what values you're effectively working with. See man 3 strcoll, man 3 setlocale, etc.

LC_COLLATE=C (or POSIX or no locale at all) results in a strict byte-by-byte comparison.

LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8 results in an alphabetical-equivalence sort, with punctuation ignored and characters within the same equivalence class treated equally.

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Indeed, export LC_COLLATE=C makes sort behave as expected –  Leo Alekseyev Nov 30 '10 at 0:47
2  
Accents are not completely ignored. Stephane sorts before Stéphane, but Stephanie sorts after Stéphane. é is equivalent to e (like ê, ë, ẽ...), but if there's a tie, then the order between those is well defined. It's the same in a good old paper dictionary. –  Stéphane Chazelas May 16 '14 at 14:43
    
If you really want to know it all: unicode.org/reports/tr10 –  Carpetsmoker Nov 24 '14 at 20:05

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