Sort feature ?
guy at sun.UUCP
guy at sun.UUCP
Thu Aug 7 17:49:58 AEST 1986
> The reason is that sort considers the delimiter as a field terminator
> and not as a field separator. Does anyone have a fix for this
> feature (bug)?
This behavior persists in the S5R2 "sort", which seems to be derived from
Linderman's (answering your second question). The real question is "Does
anybody know whether:
this is considered a feature, and thus should not be fixed;
this is just a bug that nobody in a position to do anything
about it has encountered or had pointed out to them;
or
this is just incredibly hard to fix without breaking something
else?"
It certainly violates the Principle of Least Surprise, and has probably
caught enough people unawares; is there anything out there that *depends* on
this gross behavior?
--
Guy Harris
{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)
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