Sort command results are different in Redhat 4 vs Redhat 5

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi,

I am having a text file with the following contents

###########
File1
###########
some
page1.txt
text
page.txt

When I sort this file on Red Hat 5, then I get the following output

###########
File1
###########
page1.txt
page.txt
some
text

When I sort this file on Red Hat 4, then I get the following output

###########
File1
###########
page.txt
page1.txt
some
text

Can someone explain the reason for this behavior

-Sarbjit

2

Are you using the same locale on both systems when running sort?
If you run the command:

locale|grep LC_COLLATE

what is the output on both systems?

3

On Linux 4, the output of the Locale is :

LC_COLLATE="C"

On Linux5, the output is :

LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

So is this behavior due to change in Locale value between Linux 4 and 5. Can I change the Locale for the system?

4

If you use:

LC_ALL=C sort File1

on both systems, you should get the same results on both systems. If the command:

locale -a|grep 'en_US.UTF[-]8'

prints en_US.UTF-8 on both systems, then if you use:

LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" sort File1

on both systems, you might also get the same results on both systems (although it seems strange to me that Red Hat 5's en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE category chooses to sort ASCII characters into a different order than that specified by the C locale).

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