sort and uniq commands not running as expected when run though cron

Question

Below is a part of script which gives proper output when run manually but gives incorrect output when run using cron:

sort < file1.out | uniq -ic |sort -nr> file2.out

When run on the command line, this gives a count where lines are grouped ignoring case, such as:

73 /universal/webselfservice/pdf/r60.pdf

When running through cron, the counts are split when case varies, for example:

47 /universal/webselfservice/pdf/r60.pdf
26 /universal/webselfservice/pdf/R60.pdf

How can I get the cron output to match the command line behavior?

Answer 1

The locale used under cron is different to that in your interactive environment. One has case case-insensitive collation, and the other does not.

This means that interactively, the first sort puts /universal/webselfservice/pdf/r60.pdf and /universal/webselfservice/pdf/R60.pdf adjacent, so uniq -i can combine them. But in the locale used by cron, they are not adjacent, and get counted separately.

There two simple means to get what you want:

1. specify your case-insensitive locale as an environment variable in your crontab file, or
2. add -f (or --ignore-case) flag to the first sort.