Hi My first posting. I believe there is an omission in man pages for the sort in the Description area section.  One cannot successfully use -d or without including -f on the line. Refer to  man sort under Description  -d, --dictionary-order               consider only blanks and alphanumeric characters I have the following lines in a file   (see below as justification) I want a file sorted as straight ascii sort.  I  eventually developed the two alternate command lines shown below, for two different purposes. The undocumented bug is the requirement for the    -f    to be specified in order to have the sort work in the first of the two ASCII examples shown below, otherwise the leading blank is ignored. The first sort did not work for me unless the -f is specified.  Nowhere in the man page does it stipulate that for -d option the -f must be specified. That is the bug.   Did I not understand man  sort         or   info sort     (linux fedora 20)       ? Here are the two command lines and some sample lines as justification for my posting. I wish to sort a file shown below within the === by the first column The following is the demo script #!/bin/bash LC_ALL=C # to sort in ascii sequence where line ABCabc comes before abc       use the following sort  -f -k1d -t '|'  x                         -o ABCabc # output will have lines with leading ABC text occurring before abc as per ascii table. # The sort will not work if the -f is omitted. # The undocumented requirement is the need to specify  the -f # # to sort folding the in folded ascii sequence, where lines with sequence ABCbac sorts as AaBbCc ... use the following # This part of the man pages is correct.  Except we may specify the folding option in two ways sort -t '|' -k1f  x                                  -o  AaBbCc or the line with    sort -f -t '|' -k1 x        -o AaBbCc   Try the first command or varients without the -f  to sort in column 1 ascending sequence Here is a text file, between the === to paste into VI   Save it as x . and try to get the sort against the lines NB, the leading blank for line 1 is to force the line to be first in the output ========  Host=fedora20.fedora20          |             |                               scan from  /home/leslie/Development/scandir crc32.h                          |20140314 1736|bb96da74aa636110b822d116afbe36d82c1c0861|/home/leslie/Development/scandir md5.h                            |20140314 1736|544728de8b8dc476109922cf5601a7cd6a103916|/home/leslie/Development/scandir ABCbac                           |20140314 1901|6626094e11fee60bbe73529bd440a43961c022ce|/home/leslie/Development/scandir scandir32.c                      |20140314 1738|1526c725bf00d8268b5319b125cebd2fbb001542|/home/leslie/Development/scandir date1                            |20140314 1901|97294e445cb75e611805024d5461bd07807e9157|/home/leslie/Development/scandir sha1.o                           |20140314 1736|1ba673cd46bb246f7f380dc862f93b4737c1305c|/home/leslie/Development/scandir dirdepth.c                       |20140314 1736|8779adf41bce65b45f597ba3731db55e81aa718a|/home/leslie/Development/scandir md5Good.tar                      |20140314 1736|87ca9e022705250fe2635f87801bbf0fd2df0a0f|/home/leslie/Development/scandir crc32.c                          |20140314 1736|cb8e353eedecba7d1c0fa2bdd871a508301b10d3|/home/leslie/Development/scandir scandir32                        |20140314 1738|ddc187abd0a991183f0d148ed1f069169c5b67ab|/home/leslie/Development/scandir md5.c                            |20140314 1736|291145c0b852ec5cff52b361f2be75886f116bee|/home/leslie/Development/scandir md5                              |20140314 1736|a766f710c7f007fa930c808f1a25464f6c7fb1ae|/home/leslie/Development/scandir scandir                          |20140314 1738|525b14d0c2ed42d7c6df168ad9606573df3fa97c|/home/leslie/Development/scandir dirent.h                         |20140314 1736|281be8444edc7fdaf561cab6f86e80911f425041|/home/leslie/Development/scandir test.sh                          |20140314 1736|7ebc56b604211a222c5a3fa6caf811207134fb3f|/home/leslie/Development/scandir makefile                         |20140314 1736|8c13260814f42acb544cfd3eda64daf7a26241f3|/home/leslie/Development/scandir sort.how                         |20140314 1859|08aff8bec844bbe8684f24e9e0e5635d73a0f364|/home/leslie/Development/scandir scandirmd5                       |20140314 1738|525b14d0c2ed42d7c6df168ad9606573df3fa97c|/home/leslie/Development/scandir crc32.o                          |20140314 1736|0f3c8739e6ebc6b5d2c553687886fe47df1aa39c|/home/leslie/Development/scandir DATE2                            |20140314 1736|c31bd337d70c8d39ada367a889d623e19cd3c995|/home/leslie/Development/scandir date2                            |20140314 1901|97294e445cb75e611805024d5461bd07807e9157|/home/leslie/Development/scandir sha1.h                           |20140314 1736|017eefa93cc9fe477881fa0986465b0a125b5aa5|/home/leslie/Development/scandir scandirsha1.c                    |20140314 1738|a4ea776b95cb87047188353527128262d1059990|/home/leslie/Development/scandir blacklist.txt                    |20140314 1736|28ec0b1ef6be98a520366ea63938e0a436b1db78|/home/leslie/Development/scandir/SOX/var ====== Trying different variations of the sort with the above file leads to some results that do not appear to me to be correct. I have specified locale, and with some variants, locale appears to be ignored.  The above file is as ASCII text, not utf8   Regards  Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein