On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 02:23:25PM -0800, Roger Marquis wrote:
Yep, Solaris, xBSD. "-M" has meant by_date as long as I've been
using it (1997).
Well, you need to be a little more specific when you talk about "xBSD".
I checked OpenBSD when I first looked at your report, and it doesn't
recognize -M. FreeBSD's man page doesn't mention it, either.
I don't have a solaris machine to test this on, but I wonder if you're
just getting lucky because of locale rules. You actually can get debian
to do sort of what you want if you are in the C locale, e.g.:
env LC_ALL=C sort -M
because the LC_COLLATE rules for the C locale don't ignore whitespace,
so you're effectively sorting on initial month and then sorting all 1
digit dates followed by all two digit dates (because the 1 digit dates
are preceeded by a space, which sorts first). In the en_US locale (which
your bug report says you're using) whitespace is ignored when sorting,
and solaris *should* do the same thing if it uses the same locale rules.
(I don't remember offhand if it does, though.) sort -uM, though, should
have the same behavior (show only one line per month) regardless of
locale because you're not specifying additional keys beyond the first
(month) key. The syntax I described before (sort -k 1,1M -k 2,2n -k 3)
will be more reliable because it will work regardless of the current
locale settings, doesn't rely on an implicit behavior for non-primary
sort keys, and will work with -u.
As for community, it's a two way street. You got the answer to your
question on the same day you asked it, which is better than most
commercial support, in my experience. In return for community support
you are asked to put a little more care into submitting bug reports.
Was the original bug report the best that it could be? Could there have
been an example of your expected results versus your actual results?
Could you have mentioned other platforms that behave as you expected?
Could there have been a rationale for raising the severity of the
report? Could you have been more specific about why -u was "wholly
broken" (again, with results and counterexamples from another platform)?
Mike Stone
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