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From: Jonathan McKeown <j.mckeown@ru.ac.za>
Organization: Rhodes University
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 14:37:09 +0200
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Subject: Re: cat sort(1) sort floating point numbers?
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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