sort(1) -uf output inconsistent with

[preece at ccvaxa.UUCP]

The use of tr with sort is unlikely to do the desired thing.
When I sort things I usually want the output to look like the
input, including use of upper and lower case.  It's only the
ordering mechanism that should ignore case.  You could write a
similar sort using simple tools to (1) extract key fields into
a file, (2) tr them, (3) attach the key fields on to the front
of the corresponding data lines, (4) sort, (5) strip off the
key fields.  This seems like an awful lot of effort to do the
natural kind of sort for text fields.  The use of the -f flag
seems like a perfectly natural way to tell the sort program to
use special conventions for a text field just as the -n flag
tells sort that to use special conventions for numbers.

scott preece
ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece