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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Misunderstanding of sort behavior Post 85241 by chlorine on Tuesday 4th of October 2005 02:47:33 AM
Old 10-04-2005
OK, problem solved.

It's not a bug, I just misunderstood the behaviour of the -c option of sort:
it does not just check that the file is sorted according to the field specified
by the -k option, it checks that the file is identical to what sort would produce
on the file when sorting it according to this field.
The behavior of sort when two lines have the same value for the specified
field is to compare the whole of these two lines to sort them with respect
to one another. Providing the --stable option causes it instead to leave
them in the order they were in in the original file.
Therefore running sort -c --stable correctly identifies that the file is sorted
according to the desired field in my case.

Here's a short example of this behaviour:
$ cat test_sort
bbb aaa 2
aaa bbb 2
aaa aaa 1
$ sort -k 3,3n -k 2,2 test_sort
aaa aaa 1
bbb aaa 2
aaa bbb 2
$ sort -k 3,3n -k 2,2 test_sort | sort -c -k 3,3n
sort: -:3: disorder: aaa bbb 2
$ sort -k 3,3n -k 2,2 test_sort | sort -c --stable -k 3,3n

This last check is successful.
Thanks for your help, it's the designing of this small example that helped me
understand what the problem was!
 

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look(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   look(1)

NAME
look - Finds lines in a sorted list SYNOPSIS
look [-df] [-tcharacter] string [file] The look command prints all lines in a sorted file that begin with string. OPTIONS
Uses dictionary order; only letters, digits, tabs, and spaces are used in comparisons. Searches without regard to case; treats uppercase and lowercase as equivalent. Ignores character and characters following it in the search string. If you specify look -tC ABCDE, the string ABCDE would become (in effect) AB, with CDE being ignored. This option is primarily for shell scripts, in which more than one string is being processed. DESCRIPTION
If no file is specified, look searches in the system word list /usr/share/dict/words, with the options -df assumed by default. The look command uses binary search. The -d and -f options affect comparisons as in sort. NOTES
In order to use the -f option, you must first sort file with the sort -f command; otherwise, look displays only lowercase items. If you do not specify -f, but specify a file (such as /usr/share/dict/words) that has been sorted with sort -f, look may not produce any output. EXAMPLES
To search a sorted file called sortfile for all lines that begin with the string as, enter: look as sortfile To search the system word list for all words beginning with smi, enter: look smi This might result in: smile smirk smith smithereens Smithfield Smithson smithy smitten FILES
System word list. SEE ALSO
Commands: grep(1), sort(1), spell(1) look(1)
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