GNU bug report logs - #6366
join can't join on numeric fields

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Package: coreutils;

Reported by: Alex Shinn <alexshinn <at> gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 05:24:02 UTC

Severity: wishlist

Tags: patch

Merged with 10924, 12264

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From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> CS.UCLA.EDU>
To: bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org
Subject: bug#6366: join can't join on numeric fields
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:06:56 -0700

On 06/08/2010 11:56 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:

> There may be a fly in the ointment.
> 
> When comparing floating point numbers how would join measure equality?

The point is that "join" should be compatible with "sort".
Any option that "sort" has to compare fields,
is an option that "join" should also have.
The same code should be used for both "join" and "sort",
to do comparison.  So, if "sort" has an option to do
IEEE-754 comparison in a certain way, "join" should
have the same option.

Arguably "uniq" should have the same set of options,
when checking whether two lines are equal, but I'd
say that's lower priority.
This bug report was last modified 6 years and 285 days ago.

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