What's the difference between --general-numeric-sort and --numeric-sort options in gnu sort

sort provides two kinds of numeric sort. This is from the man page:

   -g, --general-numeric-sort
          compare according to general numerical value

   -n, --numeric-sort
          compare according to string numerical value

What's the difference?

Solution 1:

General numeric sort compares the numbers as floats, this allows scientific notation eg 1.234E10 but is slower and subject to rounding error (1.2345678 could come after 1.2345679), numeric sort is just a regular alphabetic sort that knows 10 comes after 9.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/sort-invocation.html

‘-g’ ‘--general-numeric-sort’ ‘--sort=general-numeric’ Sort numerically, using the standard C function strtod to convert a prefix of each line to a double-precision floating point number. This allows floating point numbers to be specified in scientific notation, like 1.0e-34 and 10e100. The LC_NUMERIC locale determines the decimal-point character. Do not report overflow, underflow, or conversion errors. Use the following collating sequence: Lines that do not start with numbers (all considered to be equal). NaNs (“Not a Number” values, in IEEE floating point arithmetic) in a consistent but machine-dependent order. Minus infinity. Finite numbers in ascending numeric order (with -0 and +0 equal). Plus infinity.

Use this option only if there is no alternative; it is much slower than --numeric-sort (-n) and it can lose information when converting to floating point.

‘-n’ ‘--numeric-sort’ ‘--sort=numeric’ Sort numerically. The number begins each line and consists of optional blanks, an optional ‘-’ sign, and zero or more digits possibly separated by thousands separators, optionally followed by a decimal-point character and zero or more digits. An empty number is treated as ‘0’. The LC_NUMERIC locale specifies the decimal-point character and thousands separator. By default a blank is a space or a tab, but the LC_CTYPE locale can change this.

Comparison is exact; there is no rounding error.

Neither a leading ‘+’ nor exponential notation is recognized. To compare such strings numerically, use the --general-numeric-sort (-g) option.

Solution 2:

You should be careful with your locale. For example, you might intend to sort a floating number (like 2.2) whereas your locale might expect the use of a comma (like 2,2).

As reported in this forum, you may have wrong results using the -n or -g flags.

In my case I use:

LC_ALL=C sort -k 6,6n file

in order to sort the 6th column that contains:

2.5
3.7
1.4

in order to obtain

1.4
2.5
3.7