How can I make GNU sort put uppercase letters first?

Question

I want everything else to remain identical, only have uppercase letters come first.

Answer 1

This may be mostly a locale issue. If you don't need anything specific to your locale (and want your script to work the same on different systems), you may reset LC_COLLATE like this:

$ echo -e "foo\nFoo" | LC_COLLATE=C sort
Foo
foo

You may also set LC_COLLATE for the whole life-time of your script if you don't need any locale-specific collations anywhere:

export LC_COLLATE=C