cat and sort in a pipe; strange behaviour

[Cristian Zoicas]

If I found a bug and I'm not sure if bash is resposible for this problem
where will I make the report ?

In any case if what I found is a bug - and I think that is - then here
is the bug report.

Configuration Information [Automatically generated, do not change]:
Machine: sparc
OS: solaris2.7
Compiler: gcc
Compilation CFLAGS:  -DPROGRAM='bash' -DCONF_HOSTTYPE='sparc'
-DCONF_OSTYPE='solaris2.7' -DCONF_MACHTYPE='sparc-sun-solaris2.7'
-DCONF_VENDOR='sun' -DSHELL -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -I.  -I. -I./lib
-I/usr/local/include -g -O2
uname output: SunOS caslon 5.7 Generic_106541-11 sun4u sparc
SUNW,Ultra-5_10
Machine Type: sparc-sun-solaris2.7

Bash Version: 2.03
Patch Level: 0
Release Status: release

Description:

    In a shell script I'm trying to make a pipe between cat and sort. It
    is very strange that sometimes I'm losing informations from the result.
    The result must have at lease 30.000 lines and it has only 900 lines.
    In any case this reduction of the number of lines is not happening
    because I'm sorting in a unique mode.

Repeat-By:

    I'm not able to repeat the sequence. It is happening only in rare
    cases ( but not *very* rare ). 2-3 times/day.

Fix:

    I don't know how to fix the problem. Also I'm not sure if is a
    problem of 'bash', 'cat' or 'sort'.