Path: utzoo!telly!lethe!becker!bdb
From: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce D. Becker)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: Sort bug causes data loss
Keywords: bug, sort
Message-ID: <39029@becker.UUCP>
Date: 21 Sep 90 02:10:55 GMT
References: <2675@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Organization: G. T. S., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 25

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.
|
|  I have generated the following shell script to test for the problem.
| [...]

	This isn't a problem on the AT&T 3B1, although
	Convergent may have used the BSD version...

-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ontario
a /i/	 Internet: bdb@becker.UUCP, bruce@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu
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 _< /_	 "I still have my phil-os-o-phy" - Meredith Monk