On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:23 PM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

[...snip...]

Originally the locale was C. If you go back to the C locale things
will be working for you as you wish it to work. It will work as it
worked before. Agreed?

Then you changed something. You changed the locale. You in your
environment set LANG=en_US.UTF-8 (or similar equivalent). That is
when you notice that sort doesn't work as you want it to work.

What about sorting input based on the input's locale, instead of the system's? Sort

can distinguish ASCII (iso) from UTF-8 and collate accordingly. Even users in UTF-8

systems (like me) get ASCII files smts and need to collate them correctly. For sanity

purposes users could override the locale with a command line option.

[...snip...]

The only way to fix it is to fix it at the source of the problem. The
source is the locale collation sequence. Which is why I always set
this in my environment.

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_COLLATE=C

But while that works for most western locales I have no idea how that
would interact with chinese big5 for example. Probably badly. So it
can't really be offered as a general solution to the problem. But if
you are using one of the set of western locales that it works for then
it does solve the problem for you.

That is dangerous. I don't know how much software will stop working correctly because of that.

Of course, one can always return locale back to its original value, but problems might not be that obvious at all :-(

[...snip...]

Bob