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Sort concept confusion

 
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# 1  
Old 08-29-2014
Sort concept confusion
By default, sort reorders lines in ASCII collating sequence --- whitespace first, then numerals,uppercase letters and finally lowercase letters.

Shellscript:cat sort.txt
Code:
aaa
bbb
ddd
AAA
eee
GGG
ggg

Shellscript:sort sort.txt
Code:
aaa
AAA
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg
GGG

Why the default output does not come out with the small letters first and at the end capital letters.

I was thinking that the output of sort sort.txt should come out as:-
Code:
aaa
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg
AAA
GGG

Thanks
Last edited by Don Cragun; 08-29-2014 at 05:17 AM.. Reason: Add CODE tags for output.
# 2  
Old 08-29-2014
Hi,

The flavour of Unix that you are using has an impact here, some would function as you expect - I think SVR3 behaved in that manner by default.

Regards

Dave
# 3  
Old 08-29-2014
According to the standards, the default sort order matches the order of characters in the ASCII code set. So:
Code:
sort sort.txt

should give you:
Code:
AAA
GGG
aaa
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg

And, the command:
Code:
sort -f sort.txt

(with -f used to fold lowercase characters to uppercase for comparisons) should yield:
Code:
AAA
aaa
bbb
ddd
eee
GGG
ggg

What OS are you using? What is the output from the commands:
Code:
type sort
alias sort

on your system?
# 4  
Old 08-29-2014
The sort order (of the GNU sort command) is determined by the locale you specified in your environment:
Code:
$ export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
$ sort s.txt
aaa
AAA
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg
GGG
$ export LC_ALL=POSIX
$ sort s.txt
AAA
GGG
aaa
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg

Last edited by cero; 08-29-2014 at 06:03 AM..
These 2 Users Gave Thanks to cero For This Post:
Don Cragun shellscripting
# 5  
Old 08-29-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by cero
The sort order (of the GNU sort command) is determined by the locale you specified in your environment:
Code:
$ export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
$ sort s.txt
aaa
AAA
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg
GGG
$ export LC_ALL=POSIX
$ sort s.txt
AAA
GGG
aaa
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware that the Linux LC_COLLATE category of the en_US.utf8 Locale used a different sort order of ASCII characters than the POSIX and C Locales. On the system I've been working on recently (OS X), as long as all of the characters being sorted were ASCII characters, the C, POSIX, and any English locale (i.e. LC_COLLATE=en_CountryCode.codeset) would all produce identical sort output.
# 6  
Old 08-29-2014
Thank you Cero for the concept. I will google for LC_ALL and LC_COLLATE.
I got my desired output.

shellscript:cat sort.txt
Code:
aaa
bbb
ddd
AAA
eee
GGG
ggg

shellscript:sort sort.txt
Code:
aaa
AAA
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg
GGG

shellscript:
Code:
export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8

shellscript:sort sort.txt
Code:
aaa
AAA
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg
GGG

shellscript:export LC_ALL=POSIX
shellscript:sort sort.txt
Code:
AAA
GGG
aaa
bbb
ddd
eee
ggg

shellscript:
# 7  
Old 08-29-2014
You do not need to export the variable, you can also use it locally, like so:
Code:
LC_ALL=C sort file

This User Gave Thanks to Scrutinizer For This Post:
shellscripting
 
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