On 11/11/2014 11:27 AM, Leslie S Satenstein wrote: [please don't top-post on technical lists - it makes it harder to figure out what you are asking] > Why not have used sort -t ',' -k 1n ? > >> >> This results in line 7 being sorted incorrectly: sort -t , -k 1n < weird.csv Are you asking the difference between: sort -t , -k 1n sort -t ',' -k 1n If so, there's no difference. The shell strips the '' quoting around , before invoking sort, so argv[] is the same in either spelling from the shell. But that has nothing to do with the bug report, where the answer is that the caller should have been using: sort -t , -k 1,1n or LC_ALL=C sort -t , -k 1n or the combination: LC_ALL=C sort -t , -k 1,1n -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org