title: bash sort unusual order. Problem with spaces?
body: <p>Lots of time gone in to a bug, which tracks back to sort...</p>
  
  <p>Can someone explain why I get this unsorted result, when the bash docs tell me the delimiter is a transition from white to non-white characters? Shouldn't the first field be sorted?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;sort myfile.txt
  10_10000000 19
  10_10000001 20
  10_10000002 19
  10_10000003 17
  10_10000004 16
  10_1000000 44
  10_10000005 16
  10_10000006 16
  10_10000007 17
  10_10000008 16
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>of course using +0 -1 gives me my expected result:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;sort +0 -1 myfile.txt
  10_1000000 44
  10_10000000 19
  10_10000001 20
  10_10000002 19
  10_10000003 17
  10_10000004 16
  10_10000005 16
  10_10000006 16
  10_10000007 17
  10_10000008 16
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Some metainfo:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;type sort
  sort is hashed (/bin/sort)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am using </p>
  
  <pre><code>sort (GNU coreutils) 5.97
  
  
  &gt;locale
  LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
  LC_ALL=
  </code></pre>