Hi, I seem to have detected a bug in sort. Can you confirm? ~ $ ~ $ sort --version sort (GNU coreutils) 8.4 Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later . This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Written by Mike Haertel and Paul Eggert. ~ $ cat test.txt | sort -g 2e-1 2e-1 2e-1 2e-1 1.0e-1 1.0e-2 1.0e-2 1.0e-3 1.0e-4 2.0e-1 2.0e-2 2.0e-2 2.0e-2 2.0e-2 3.0e-2 3.0e-2 3.0e-2 3.0e-2 3.0e-2 3.0e-2 15 2e+1 2e+1 2e+1 2e+1 115 119 150 2e+2 2e+2 2e+2 2e+2 2e+3 2e+3 2e+3 2e+3 ~ $ cat test.txt 3.0e-2 1.0e-4 2.0e-2 3.0e-2 1.0e-1 2.0e-1 3.0e-2 1.0e-2 2.0e-2 3.0e-2 1.0e-2 2.0e-2 3.0e-2 1.0e-3 2.0e-2 3.0e-2 15 119 115 150 2e+1 2e-1 2e+3 2e+2 2e+1 2e-1 2e+3 2e+2 2e+1 2e-1 2e+3 2e+2 2e+1 2e-1 2e+3 2e+2 ~ $ I think this result is never what anybody would expect; 2e-1 is larger than 1.0e-1 and 1.0e-4 is smaller than 1.0e-1. The above is running on Ubuntu 14.04. On a Cygwin installation the result is fine. Thank you, kind regards, Matthijs.