Re: why aren't gnu utils normalized?

[Hyman Rosen]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Does it actually fail to work?  What happens instead?

Yes, it actually "fails" to work. Given these inputs

    File "a":               File "b":
    2 a                     1 a
    10 b                    10 b

the command "join a b" produces no output. The OP would
like "join" to take the same commands to specify the sort
order of the join column that the "sort" command takes in
order to sort columns, rather than requiring the join
column to be sorted in lexical order.