Sorting Files With 'sort'

**xluryan** · January 26th, 2009

That's very counter-intuitive, although I'm sure they had their reasons when they created it that way. Unless that was not their intent.

It perplexes me as to why sort options are allowed after the 2nd field position indicator, yet the -b flag is not. I suppose I should say ineffective rather than not allowed. Very interesting...

edit
Looking again at the man file, it does say:

Code:

POS is F[.C][OPTS]

I suppose it told us right there that the options go directly after the field and/or character position, and not after the 2nd field position. I completely missed that

**heindsight** · January 26th, 2009

It is a bit counter intuitive, but in a way it makes sense.

You can put the options after the first or second POS and for all options except 'b' it makes no difference whether you put it after the first, second or both.

It's not clear from the documentation what differences are between putting 'b' after the first, after the second or after both position indicators. It seems clear from my experiments that putting 'b' after the first POS causes leading blanks to be ignored for the field. Perhaps putting it after the second POS ignores trailing blanks (eg if the -t option is used).