Question

I am using sort both on Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux, and I am observing a different handling of uppercase/lowercase comparisons.

On Mac OS X, sort (GNU coreutils) 5.93 gives the behavior I expect:

$ sort <<EOF
> Aa
> aa
> Ab
> ab
> EOF
Aa
Ab
aa
ab

On Ubuntu, sort (GNU coreutils) 8.5 seems to ignore case:

$ sort <<EOF
> Aa
> aa
> Ab
> ab
> EOF
aa
Aa
ab
Ab

Is there a way to disable this behavior? I need case-sensitive sort.
I tried to change the LOCALE to C and nothing changed.

Alternatively, is there any other simple utility that sorts large files treating each line just as a byte string?

Answer 1

try using POSIX: ‘export LANG=POSIX’