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Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 23:06:15 +0000
From: "Dave Korn" <dave DOT korn DOT cygwin AT googlemail DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Inconsistency with sort -n?
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Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E] wrote:
> `sort -n' and `sort -g' work inconsistently with 0 and -0 if there are
> leading spaces.  Sometimes -0 is before 0, as I would expect, and sometimes
> it is afterwards.  Adding `-b' does not seem to help.
>
> Is this where I should report it or should I go upstream?

  Kinda depends where it's coming from. Could be newlib, could be cygwin,
could be sort itself. Either the + and - zeros aren't being correctly
converted to their float representations, or the comparison of + vs. - zero
isn't working right, at a first guess.

> In case you are wondering why I want to do this:  I'm counting items in a
> bin so the bin from -1 to 0 and 0 to +1 are different.

  Hacky work-around: " | sort -r | sort [-n|-g] -s". First alphabetic sort
using -r gets all the negative numbers at the start of the list, then adding
stable flag to the numeric sort preserves their relative ordering when they
compare equal.

> Happy Gregorian New Year!

  Happy Pastafarian Noodly YARRRR!

    cheers,
      DaveK

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