Roger Marquis wrote: > >because the LC_COLLATE rules for the C locale don't ignore > >whitespace > > I could find nothing in the POSIX Locale spec that requires every > flag of a command to ignore whitespace. Such a requirement would > be ridiculous on its face.
POSIX requires that sort respect the values of LANG, LC_COLLATE and LC_ALL to set the locale for ordering rules. http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/sort.html > >Not broken, more working as designed (as is coreutils). Your > >expectations may not match the behavior, but it is consistent > >with the design (and documentation) of the sort command. > > Your opinion, probably motivated by the desire avoid fixing a bug. > Sort's -M flag was designed to sort the syslog date field, and > ignore whitespace, and there is no Unicode requirement that > conflicts with that design. You don't like it. I don't like it. I don't know of anyone who likes it. But just the same the powers-that-be have created the locale collating sequences in such a way that whitespace and punctuation is ignored and case is folded. Personally I think they confused working with data on a computer with writing text about working on a computer. You probably need to set LC_ALL=C in your environment. > >>This is not an issue, however, because Solaris does not set the > >>default LANG to UTF-8 > >Neither does debian, that's an install-time choice. (Solaris has > >the same kind of install-time locale selection.) > > I can't recall changing this default during installation. What > should /etc/environment have set LANG to? Try this: sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales In answer to the debconf question "Which locale should be the default in the system environment?" select "None". Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
