Set collation order in shell sort to not ignore special characters

Question

I am looking for a solution for sorting in postgres but it seems to be more of a problem of collation and therefore I ask the question for the standard Unix sort command instead.

I have the following data:

A_A1
A\A2
A_A2
A\A1

after sort I get:

cat test.txt |sort

A_A1
A\A1
A_A2
A\A2

but I want:

A_A1
A_A2
A\A1
A\A2

I also tried LANG=C cat... but to no avail. So which collation rule would allow me to not ignore the special characters?

Answer 1

From man sort:

Set LC_ALL=C to get the traditional sort order that uses native byte values.

So:

$ LC_ALL=C sort test.txt
A\A1
A\A2
A_A1
A_A2

so the C locale does sort after byte value.

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You need to do

$ cat test.txt | LC_ALL=C sort

if you want to pipe it like that (but always try to use the file name version directly if it's available).

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The primary environment variable affecting this is LC_COLLATE. If LC_ALL is set though, it trumps all specific LC_ values. If neither LC_ALL nor LC_COLLATE are set, it falls back on LANG. If that is not set, it defaults to locale C.