Sort bug causes data loss
Bruce D. Becker
bdb at becker.UUCP
Fri Sep 21 12:10:55 AEST 1990
In article <2675 at crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen at crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
|
| I have discovered what appears to be a serious bug in the sort
|routine used in several SysV variants including Stellar. Since it
|causes silent loss of data I am cross posting a bit more than I usually
|do.
|
| The problem occurs when the options -n (numeric) and -u (discard
|duplicates) are used together sorting data which has a fixed width
|numeric as the first key field. The results is output of only one line,
|regardless of the input data. I found this by losing 15 months of data
|(yes it was backed up). Since sort is often in shell scripts run from
|cron to do system things, this problem might not be instantly noticed.
|
| I have generated the following shell script to test for the problem.
| [...]
This isn't a problem on the AT&T 3B1, although
Convergent may have used the BSD version...
--
,u, Bruce Becker Toronto, Ontario
a /i/ Internet: bdb at becker.UUCP, bruce at gpu.utcs.toronto.edu
`\o\-e UUCP: ...!uunet!mnetor!becker!bdb
_< /_ "I still have my phil-os-o-phy" - Meredith Monk
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