How to sort numbers

Ah, bugger. That doesn't work. The masses are not integers but floating-point values. No worries, sort is smart and can handle that, I just have to tell it:

cat data | sort -g -r > data_sorted

9.94361e+14
9.94361e+13
9.94361e+13
9.94361e+13
9.94361e+13
9.9176e+16
9.88624e+14
9.86872e+14
...

Ghee! Still not working! But it should? At least -g is doing something different than -n; though that doesn't help at all. Now, I had that same problem a couple of weeks ago and got it working. Writing down such things might be of help^c. But okay, lets ask Google.

No good. At least not without some really good query. But a thought hit me. Isn't sorting locale depending? And I am using de_DE@euro. So, lets see:

cat data | LANG=C sort -g -r > data_sorted

3.19946e+18
1.18662e+18
9.31701e+17
7.51848e+17
7.27704e+17
7.13003e+17
5.41289e+17
5.29525e+17
...

Hooray! The C locale did the trick. That's what I wanted. Note: Always do numerical (especially general numeric, read floating point) sorting in the C locale.

^a: That is just the mass on the x-axis and the number of halos having a higher mass than this on the y-axis.

^b: The -r to have the result being order descending, so that the line number automatically gives the number of halos with this or higher mass.

^c: Exactly why I am writing this now. Next time I know where to look.