[vox] sort and locale

[Bill Kendrick <nbsMAPS@sonic.net>]

Ok, I obviously didn't read down far enough in the man page when this
problem first started occuring... :^)

Say you go to sort a file that has the following text in it:

  !!Last	First	Email
  Kendrick	Bill	nbs@sonic.net
  Salzman	Pete	p@dirac.org

You expect it to pretty much come out exactly the same, no?

Well, lately, on _some_ systems, it's been coming out like so:

  Kendrick	Bill	nbs@sonic.net
  !!Last	First	Email
  Salzman	Pete	p@dirac.org

Argh!  Since when is "!" between "K" and "S"???

Ok - Well, I see what it's doing, of course.  Ignoring the "!"s and
using the "L".

That's fine.  More power to you, 'sort'... it's just, that's not what
I want!


Well, finally the answer has been pointed out.  (Thanks to someone having
the same issue on SVLUG's list.)

It's a locale issue.  When no particular locale is set, 'sort' was
defaulting to "en_US" - as mentioned on SVLUG's list:  "undesired"

What we WANT is "C" or "POSIX" - which will sort by the value of the
character (i.e., ASCII).

So, if I do either:

  export LC_COLLATE=C

or:

  export LC_ALL=C

it works as expected! :^)



I just thought I'd share that with y'all ... back to regular business...


-bill!
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