Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 14:37:09 +0200 From: Jonathan McKeown <j.mckeown@ru.ac.za> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cat sort(1) sort floating point numbers? Message-ID: <201110031437.09327.j.mckeown@ru.ac.za> In-Reply-To: <20111003120542.GA98919@mech-cluster241.men.bris.ac.uk> References: <20111003120542.GA98919@mech-cluster241.men.bris.ac.uk>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Monday 03 October 2011 14:05:42 Anton Shterenlikht wrote: > I tried sorting a file with a column of floating > point numbers (below) with sort(1) -n. However, > the numbers seem to have been sorted by the first > digit only. sort -g Due to the GNU project's obsession with info (<http://xkcd.com/912/>), you= =20 can't readily find this out from the manpage - but the info documentation=20 available on the web for coreutils describes the difference between -g=20 and -n: [when using -n] Neither a leading =E2=80=98+=E2=80=99 nor exponential notat= ion is recognized.=20 To compare such strings numerically, use the --general-numeric-sort (-g)=20 option. Jonathan
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?201110031437.09327.j.mckeown>