Re: Possible bug in 'sort -m'

[Cameron Hutchison <camh@xdna.net>]

Bob McGowan wrote:

>Here, I numerically sort and merge the two source files into a 
>destination and count lines in all three.  Then I get unique lines from 
>the merged sort and count the result.
>$ sort -n -m from_number to_number > xxx

A merge sort (sort -m) needs the input files to be already sorted. The
man page for -m says "merge already sorted files; do not sort". You have
not shown that from_number and to_number are already sorted, so there is
a possible failure right there.

You should also indicate the versions of sort and uniq that you are
using. There may well be bugs. Have you checked the changelogs for these
programs since your version to see if there have been related bugs
fixed?