I upgraded to version 8.7 coreutils on several systems a few days ago.
Works fine on Snow Leopard (MACHTYPE = x86_64), but I think I've run into an obscure bug on Leopard (MACHTYPE = i386).
The test command is :
sort -u -s --key=1,1 sort_8.7_i386_bug_testdata > xxx
works with version 8.5, crashes with version 8.7, on i386 (Leopard) macintosh. Both versions work on x86_64 (snow leopard).
It requires a pretty big file. This file has 579k records. Subsets of 400k or so records seem to work.
The test data file is available at :
Happy Holidays....