Re^6: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?

Thank you; indeed, Perl has no guilt.

As I was trying to track down a slightly more complicated issue, I just was on the wrong track for a while.

Looks like _my_ real problem originates from something I now believe to be an en_US.UTF-8 locale/glibc bug or problem which I can reproduce at system level.

Given a simple file having two records with two TAB separated fields each, like

a_2    2
a2     1

a command like 'sort -k 1 | cut -f 1 ' on that file displays

a2
a_2

(as if the field delimiter wouldn't work and the second field determines the ordering), whereas on the same file _without_ the second field the sort order is reversed.

This looks like a bug to me, tough I'm not sure yet and don't really know so far whom I should or could report this.

Thanks!
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Comment on Re^6: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?

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Re^7: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 21, 2010 at 16:01 UTC
Maybe trailing numbers are special. Add one character to every item you want to sort, sort the items, then chop them. Update: I guess that only works if the character is the one with the lowest sort order, and which one that is isn't known.	[reply]
Re^7: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...? by choroba (Cardinal) on Oct 22, 2010 at 11:21 UTC
You should use `sort -k1,1` to make sort ignore the rest of the line.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^8: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...? by Krambambuli (Curate) on Oct 22, 2010 at 12:20 UTC
Thanks for the tip - I really hoped it might solve the issue, but unfortunately it does not. For the file test.txt (TAB separated fields) being `a_2 2 a2 1` [download] I still get `$ sort -k 1,1 test.txt \| cut -f 1 a2 a_2` [download] whereas when there is no second field then the result is reversed, `a_2 a2` [download] Looks like the problem 'survives'. ---	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^9: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...? by choroba (Cardinal) on Oct 22, 2010 at 12:33 UTC
Looks like two level sort: on the first level, it ignores the _, but if the strings are different only thanks to the underscore, it is used in the second level. `$ echo $'a_2\t2\na2\t1' \| sort -k1 a2 1 a_2 2 $ echo $'a_2\t2\na2\t1' \| sort -k1,1 a2 1 a_2 2 $ echo $'a2\t2\na_2\t1' \| sort -k1,1 a2 2 a_2 1 $ echo $'a2\t2\na_2\t1' \| sort -k1 a_2 1 a2 2` [download]	[reply] [d/l]