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authorEric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>2010-04-20 16:26:27 -0600
committerEric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>2010-04-21 07:59:03 -0600
commita9b904a282b5ca61c9a1f41389832747689ed9cf (patch)
treed996f4ae5c9d705205e4f11d94ce86780d9c8b8f /doc
parent7dc398a30f9edee4af9d0676d7c682db0f83fa8d (diff)
downloadcoreutils-a9b904a282b5ca61c9a1f41389832747689ed9cf.tar.xz
docs: document transformation of obsolete sort syntax
* doc/coreutils.texi (sort invocation): Mention the conversion.
Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
-rw-r--r--doc/coreutils.texi5
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/coreutils.texi b/doc/coreutils.texi
index 7561f2a61..f40993ec1 100644
--- a/doc/coreutils.texi
+++ b/doc/coreutils.texi
@@ -4126,6 +4126,11 @@ is counted from the first nonblank character of the field.
@vindex POSIXLY_CORRECT
On older systems, @command{sort} supports an obsolete origin-zero
syntax @samp{+@var{pos1} [-@var{pos2}]} for specifying sort keys.
+The obsolete sequence @samp{sort +@var{a}.@var{x} -@var{b}.@var{y}}
+is equivalent to @samp{sort -k @var{a+1}.@var{x+1},@var{b}} if @var{y}
+is @samp{0} or absent, otherwise it is equivalent to @samp{sort -k
+@var{a+1}.@var{x+1},@var{b+1}.@var{y}}.
+
This obsolete behavior can be enabled or disabled with the
@env{_POSIX2_VERSION} environment variable (@pxref{Standards
conformance}); it can also be enabled when @env{POSIXLY_CORRECT} is