In addition, if the final byte of an input file is not a newline, GNU sort silently supplies one. The following options affect the ordering of output lines. They may be specified globally or as part of a specific key field. Ignore leading blanks when finding sort keys in each line. This allows floating point numbers to be specified in scientific notation, like 1.0e-34 and 10e100 .
Invalid names compare low to valid names.
Rather than first converting each string to the C double type and then comparing those values, sort aligns the decimal points in the two strings and compares the strings a character at a time. One benefit of using this approach is its speed. In addition, there is no corresponding loss of precision. Converting each string to double before comparison would limit precision to about 16 digits on most systems. Reverse the result of comparison, so that lines with greater key values appear earlier in the output instead of later.