cat sort(1) sort floating point numbers?
Jonathan McKeown
j.mckeown at ru.ac.za
Mon Oct 3 12:37:14 UTC 2011
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
can't readily find this out from the manpage - but the info documentation
available on the web for coreutils describes the difference between -g
and -n:
[when using -n] Neither a leading ‘+’ nor exponential notation is recognized.
To compare such strings numerically, use the --general-numeric-sort (-g)
option.
Jonathan
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