in reply to Re^6: perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?
in thread perllocale weirdness, bug, or...?

You should use sort -k1,1 to make sort ignore the rest of the line.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
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]
      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]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom