Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tekcrl!tekgvs!sail!terryl
From: terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: Sort bug causes data loss
Keywords: bug, sort
Message-ID: <8129@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 17 Sep 90 17:31:11 GMT
References: <2675@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Sender: news@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM
Reply-To: terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM (Terry Laskodi)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 19

In article <2675@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
+
+  I have discovered what appears to be a serious bug in the sort
+routine used in several SysV variants including Stellar. Since it
+causes silent loss of data I am cross posting a bit more than I usually
+do.
+
+  The problem occurs when the options -n (numeric) and -u (discard
+duplicates) are used together sorting data which has a fixed width
+numeric as the first key field. The results is output of only one line,
+regardless of the input data. I found this by losing 15 months of data
+(yes it was backed up). Since sort is often in shell scripts run from
+cron to do system things, this problem might not be instantly noticed.


     Interesting. Right now I'm running on a Solbourne, which is a Sun
clone, and it has the dual BSD/SYSV environment.

     The bug shows up using the SYSV sort, but not the BSD sort.....