Subject: bug#6442: About the modifier of -k option in sort

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:34:19 -0600

On 06/17/2010 03:11 PM, Peng Yu wrote:
>> You are looking at the latest version right?
>> Would the following be enough to highlight the info you might have missed?
>>
>> --- a/src/sort.c
>> +++ b/src/sort.c
>> @@ -386,7 +386,7 @@ Other options:\n\
>>  "), stdout);
>>       fputs (_("\
>>   -k, --key=POS1[,POS2]     start a key at POS1 (origin 1), end it at POS2\n\
>> -                            (default end of line)\n\
>> +                            (default end of line).  See POS syntax below\n\
>>   -m, --merge               merge already sorted files; do not sort\n\
>>  "), stdout);
>>       fputs (_("\
> 
> Is it in the latest version? If yes, I'll install it.
> coreutils-8.5.tar.xz.sig         23-Apr-2010 12:42  836

No, the whole point of this patch is that it is for the latest
coreutils.git, which is post 8.5 (but will be in 8.6 if you like how it
is worded).

> 
> BTW, how to figure out what version of my coreutils is? I 'man sort',
> it shows the following at the bottom of that page. I don't understand
> 7.4 is of date March 2010, it should be May 2009 according to
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/, right?

No, that just means that whoever pre-built coreutils 7.4 for your distro
did so in March 2010, even though they used a tarball from May 2009.
You can _always_ use 'sort --version' to find the actual version on your
machine (and using --version works for almost every GNU program out
there, the few exceptions being programs like /bin/test that have
behavior mandated by POSIX when given a single argument).

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org