[SOLVED] How to make 'sort' case sensitive

[lomcevak]

I want to have the sort utility to be case sensitive. What I mean is if I have a file like this:

a
b
C
d
e

and sort it the upper-case C should be 1st. The output should be:

C
a
b
d
e

It seems sort is always case insentive (-f option) and I can't find a way to turn it off.

Thanks.

[scathefire]

I don't think sort does that. I think it only would work numerically. But you can check for aliases in your system by running alias:

# alias
alias l.='ls -d .* --color=tty'
alias ll='ls -l --color=tty'
alias ls='ls --color=tty'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias vi='vim'
alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'

If you want text manipulation, I would suggest Perl.

[Rubberman]

Sort should work case-sensitive by default, unless you have an alias for sort that turns on the --ignore-case (-f) option. Most systems auto-alias commands like ls to give more "user friendly" output.

[Rubberman]

Ok. I tried this on mine with the input being
a
b
c
A
B
C

and the output was
a
A
b
B
c
C

So, I guess you are correct. Seems like a bug to me... However, msort with the proper options seems to work ok. The output for that was
A
B
C
a
b
c

which is what one would expect.

[scathefire]

Here is a Perl solution:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@letters= qw(a b C d e);
print "Before letters:\n";
print "@letters\n";
@sorted_letters =  sort @letters;
print "After letters:\n";
print "@sorted_letters\n";

[lomcevak]

So, I guess you are correct. Seems like a bug to me...

Nope, it's not a bug it's a feature. ( Where have I heard that before? ) After some more digging around I determined that is the intended behaviour of GNU sort. To get (what I think is) the correct behaviour you have to set LC_ALL to "C".

# sort a.a
a
A
b
B
c
C
# export LC_ALL=C
# sort a.a
A
B
C
a
b
c

Thanks eveyone for your suggestions.