At least on Alpha, but maybe also on other platoform a collating sequence supplied in /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_COLLATE seems to fold upper and lower case thus rendering sorting utilities rather ineffective. The reason I suspect that is that in order to restore some sanity in sort one has to unset both LANG and LC_ALL environment variables. If at least one of these is set to en_US then sort colapses. Curiously enough 'ls' also appears to consult LC_COLLATE if one of variables above is set but it is not affected by this bogosity. Nichal Jaegermann michal
(changed to all platforms, it affects all of them)
assign to jakub
That's how en_US collation should look like (the case of characters matters only when the strings are equal in case insensitive comparison). Basically, if you want ASCII sorting, use POSIX/C locale, if you want the sorting people have been doing for centuries, use your locale. ls is still using strcmp while it should use strcoll, it will be changed in the future.