[MLUG] annoyance with GNU sort within system call

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I have been using 'sort' to sort files that contain numbers aligned in
columns.  Here is a very simple example:

 1
 2
10

On Solaris, sort will order lines as above.  On the other hand, GNU sort
orders the lines like this:

 1
10
 2

Now I read this in the GNU sort man page:

  *** WARNING *** The locale specified by the  environment  affects  sort
  order.  Set LC_ALL=C to get the traditional sort order that uses native
  byte values.

So I did this in my tcsh shell...

setenv LC_ALL C

...and suddenly sort is working the way I want it to!

Now here's the annoyance part of it (as if that wasn't annoying
enough!)...  I have written a C program that calls sort from the system to
process some data.  But it looks like the functioning of 'sort' will
depend on environment variables.  Is it possible to write the C program so
that LC_ALL is set to C when sort is called?  Do you have any other ideas
on how to handle this problem?  (I could use "sort -n" with some
additional arguments to control sort keys, but those sorting-key arguments
vary with the unix OS.)

Thanks in advance for any tips!

Mike
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