On Thursday, 12 March 2020 at 23:04:03 -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote: >> -,: Make the option standard: output numbers with commas every 3 digits > > A terrible idea. Yes, of course. I don't think any of us meant these ideas seriously. Was this the only objection you had? > I often do mailx -H | sort -t/ -k2nr to sort in reverse order of size--a > quick way to find the pay dirt when I want to shrink my mailbox. > This would never fly if the sizes had commas. (Well, I suppose I > could add sed s/,//g to the pipeline.) In fact, at least FreeBSD sort -n handles the numbers quite happily. I've tried it with 4.4BSD sort, which with a little coaxing builds under FreeBSD. It doesn't: it apparently sees the , as a delimiter. The real question is whether a comma is a valid character in an integer. There are arguments that it should be. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA