I ran into basically the same confusion as Eugen while trying to figure out some bugs in busybox sort and comparing the output to GNU sort.
I found the following page which gives valuable pointers to why the syntax "-k2,3n", or even worse "-k2nr,3n", are not supported: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/coreutils_28.html This has: `-t separator' [...] But note that sort fields that extend to the end of the line, as `-k 2', or sort fields consisting of a range, as `-k 2,3', retain the field separators present between the endpoints of the range. and: Note that if you had written `-k 2' instead of `-k 2,2' sort would have used all characters beginning in the second field and extending to the end of the line as the primary numeric key. For the large majority of applications, treating keys spanning more than one field as numeric will not do what you expect. Also note that the `n' modifier was applied to the field-end specifier for the first key. It would have been equivalent to specify `-k 2n,2' or `-k 2n,2n'. All modifiers except `b' apply to the associated field, regardless of whether the modifier character is attached to the field-start and/or the field-end part of the key specifier. Maybe these very valuable pointers could be added in the manpage. Hmm. I now see that this information is available in the *info* page for sort. Unfortunately, 'info sort' (as suggested in the manpage) does not give the info page, but rather the plain manpage. Only the non-intuitive 'info coreutils' followed by browsing to the sort command finds it. Cheers, FJP
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