/bin/sort -WTF

[jimbux]

I'm having a serious WTF moment here. The following output is sorted with the command $ /bin/sort <file> where <file> contains the lines below:

a.01
a.02
a02.01
a.03
a.04
a.05
a.06
a.07

..but unless I've lost my sanity the results should be this:

a.01
a.02
a.03
a.04
a.05
a.06
a.07
a02.01

I verified this by jumping on my interix windows system, opening a csh and sorting the file. It did what I expected. It seems that the '/bin/ls' command uses sort, which is how I discovered this problem. Files were not listing as I'd expect. It's as if the sort is ignoring the '.'.

Any ideas anyone!? I can't recall seeing this behavior ever before. I just switched from using csh to bash as my shell, could this be why the behavior is different? I'm at a total loss.

Thanks,
James.

[jimbux]

Ok, ok... I just figured it out. I tried one thing, but since I'm a new bash guy, I forgot something imporant (the export).

LC_ALL=C
export LC_ALL

But seriously... WTF? (At least it works the way I expect now.)

[sideways]

I think it changed a while ago, you can revert to the old behaviour with

export LC_ALL=POSIX
$ sort sorttest.txt 
a.01
a.02
a.03
a.04
a.05
a.06
a.07
a02.01

or the other methods you mention