Bug on program "sort"

[Frédéric Lang]

Hello, sorry for my engleash mail, i'm French

I have a (big?) problem on program "sort" and i think it's a bug !!!
I work on Linux Mandrake7.1, who came in France in July 2000, and i have
"textutils2.0".

I have a file with six lines and two columns and separator is ":", like
this

des:a
des:s
desb:d
desb:z
des:c
des:t

I want to sort this file on first column, so i invoke "sort -t: file"...
and look the result:

des:a
desb:d
desb:z
des:c
des:s
des:t

This is not a correctly result...  because the lines "desb:d" and
"desb:z" need to go after "des:..." But the letter "a" of "des:a" is
sorted with letter "b" of "desb:d" and the separator is not used !!!

This problem come when all lines begin by the same letters, like "des".
If i change all "desb" by "xyzb", "sort" work correctly.

If i test with "textutils-1.22", "sort" is correct.

Thank-you for read me
    Fred