Sort feature ?

[guy at sun.UUCP]

> 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)