On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, George Michaelson wrote:

> its also dying on sort +2n instances.
...
> sort (GNU coreutils) 5.97
> Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software.  You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of
> the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
> There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

I'd guess other packages will have problems too. This is common (at least 
to me). But I see coreutils 4.5.3 sort info page says:

     On older systems, `sort' supports an obsolete origin-zero syntax
     `+POS1 [-POS2]' for specifying sort keys.  POSIX 1003.1-2001 (*note
     Standards conformance::) does not allow this; use `-k' instead.

Have a look at
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/coreutils_7.html
Maybe some environment variable will work for you?

Or we could go through a fix this in

pdksh-5.2.14/siglist.sh

and elsewhere (assuming that our other Unix platforms support the other 
sort syntax).