Subject: sort: unexpected results

From: Kenneth Dickman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:37:10 -0700

Why does putting "depot" in the input file, corrupt the sort function? How can I get sort to operate properly?

$ cat good
bin/... //b/bin/...
logs/... //logs/...
... //b/...
$ sort good
... //b/...
bin/... //b/bin/...
logs/... //logs/...
$ cat bad
bin/... //depot/b/bin/...
logs/... //depot/logs/...
... //depot/b/...
$ sort bad
bin/... //depot/b/bin/...
... //depot/b/...
logs/... //depot/logs/...
$

This occurs on RedHat:

$ uname -a
Linux hidden-name 2.6.32-71.15.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jan 23 10:39:44 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ which sort
/bin/sort
$ file /bin/sort
/bin/sort: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped
$

And on Linux Mint (which is on top of Ubuntu):

$ uname -a
Linux hidden_name 3.2.0-23-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 10 20:39:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ which sort
/usr/bin/sort
$

Thanks for your help!
Ken