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From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Sorting problem with Unix sort(1) with UTF-8 punctuation characters -
 locale issue
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2025 22:35:43 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC
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References: <vp4f6o$288ui$1@dont-email.me>
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In article <vp4f6o$288ui$1@dont-email.me>,
Janis Papanagnou  <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I've been sorting punctuation characters on one Unix system and it
>did not produce the expected result. Switching to another system did
>it as expected.
>
>The test program (it contains non-ASCII middle-dot characters) was
>
>sort -t $'\t' <<EOT

Do you really have the '$' there?

	- Dan C.

>One hypothesis was that it's some locale issue. So I've copied the
>LC_* settings to the newer system and disabled them one by one.
>Strangely, the one that was responsible for the effect was LC_TIME!
>
>On the correct sorting system it was defined as
>  LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8@isodate
>and the one that worked improperly had
>  LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
>
>Now I'm puzzled in many ways...
>If anything, I'd expected LC_COLLATE to have an effect on sorting.
>Then there's no locale with @isodate on that sort-defunct system.
>And clearing that LC_TIME locale or removing the "@isodate" part
>did not change anything; it needs that setting to a non-existing
>locale file to work correctly on the otherwise not correctly
>sorting system.
>
>Does anyone have an idea what's going on here?
>
>I'm reluctant to globally set  LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8@isodate
>(since there is no file with that name in the locale directories).
>
>Thanks.
>
>Janis
>
>[*] Lines with additional other contents than the depicted payload
>were sorted correctly.