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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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WRAP-AND-SORT(1)					      General Commands Manual						  WRAP-AND-SORT(1)

NAME
wrap-and-sort - wrap long lines and sort items in Debian packaging files SYNOPSIS
wrap-and-sort [options] DESCRIPTION
wrap-and-sort wraps the package lists in Debian control files. By default the lists will only split into multiple lines if the entries are longer than 80 characters. wrap-and-sort sorts the package lists in Debian control files and all .install files. Beside that wrap-and-sort removes trailing spaces in these files. This script should be run in the root of a Debian package tree. It searches for control, control.in, copyright, copyright.in, install, and *.install in the debian directory. OPTIONS
-h, --help Show this help message and exit. -a, --wrap-always Wrap all package lists in the Debian control file even if the entries are shorter than 80 characters and could fit in one line line. -s, --short-indent Only indent wrapped lines by one space (default is in-line with the field name). -b, --sort-binary-packages Sort binary package paragraphs by name. -k, --keep-first When sorting binary package paragraphs, leave the first one at the top. Unqualified debhelper(7) configuration files are applied to the first package. -n, --no-cleanup Do not remove trailing whitespaces. -d path, --debian-directory=path Location of the debian directory (default: ./debian). -f file, --file=file Wrap and sort only the specified file. You can specify this parameter multiple times. All supported files will be processed if no files are specified. -v, --verbose Print all files that are touched. AUTHORS
wrap-and-sort and this manpage have been written by Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>. Both are released under the ISC license. DEBIAN
Debian Utilities WRAP-AND-SORT(1)
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