sort working differently in shell script

Hey folks,

I'm having problems with the "sort" command sorting in ASCII order. I'm working in Korn shell on a Solaris machine (Sun OS 5.8).

It runs fine from the command line but doesn't work okay when I call sort from a shell script.

My file has two columns and is pipe delimited and I want to sort by the first column. Here's the syntax of the command I am using.

sort -o outputfile -k 1,1 -t '|' inputfile

Reading around it sounds like it is locale related.
I've even tried the following in my shell script and it still doesn't work.

#!/bin/ksh
export LC_COLLATE=C
sort -o outputfile -k 1,1 -t '|' inputfile

Bottom line: my sort works on the command line (sorts in ascii order) but doesn't work when called from the shell (sorts in en_US order)

Please help. I'd prefer use shell scripts instead of manually typing in my commands.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Something is funny in your envirinment.
Try the following:
From the command line

Next, issue the same command from inside your problem shell script. I think you will see some things have changed

Here's what I get from the command line
$ locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=

The name of my shell script is "sort_test.ksh" here's what I get
when I embed locale in my script:
$ sort_test.ksh testdir ../dat
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=

Thanks for your help.

sort responds to locale - - LC_COLLATE.

Is the file in wide characters or UTF-8 format?

The file is in UTF-8 format but I got it to work after talking to a colleague in my office. I think I was having problems with the pipe delimeter. My sort now works inside a shell script by rearranging some thing and denoting the delimiter differently.

Here's what finally worked:

sort -d -k 1,1 -t\| -o outfile infile

Thanks for replying to my earlier message