How to sort a file by pure ASCII order?

[Omer Zak]

I encountered a counterintuitive behavior of 'sort' in modern Linux
releases.

I checked the sorting behavior of sort, as installed in Debian Jessie
and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Turns out that the default behavior of sort (with locale=en_US.UTF-8) is
not to sort by ASCII order, but as if letters and digits are more
important to sort order than punctuation marks.

Attached please find a sort-test.txt file and the output of
sort < sort-test.txt (as the file actual.txt).

To show how would the output look like using pure ASCII sort, I sorted
sort-test.txt using python-sort.py (attached).
and got the result reproduced in correct.txt (attached).

The problem is then what options would get GNU sort to sort like
python-sort.py?

Can anyone shed a light on the matter?

--- Omer


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