Be careful to double-check your locale.

On Linux with GNU sort I've been bitten in the past by the fact that the default locale does not consider some characters (in that case tabs) to be part of the collating operation.

For that reason I find it a good precaution to set $LC_ALL to C before using GNU sort.

In reply to Re^2: Need to sort large table of data... by tilly
in thread Need to sort large table of data... by fiddler42

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