Man ... I dunno, maybe the world needs different sorting logic between Canada and the US but to me it just looks like making trouble. Anyway kudos for figuring that out.... I don't know what to say.Seems like differing locales (which I overlooked earlier). On Debian 12:
Because at least the dictionary sort proceeds left to right with each subsequent character sorted as a sub-sort within the fixed sort arrived at by previous characters. IOW as you move right, nothing ever changes to the left. If 'aaa,6,' precedes 'aaa,6a' then every possible expansion of 'aaa,6,' will precede every possible expansion of 'aaa,6a'. It's the same as with numbers: every 2,xxx is greater than every 1,xxx. I suppose there's something in the version sort that interferes with that. Mind ... (n) is not an explicit version sort, so what's the algorithm? This gets interesting. And ... Ooops, no, that's not what I'm expecting I'm expecting:aaa,6, aaa,6a aaa,6,howdy aaa,6a,howdyWhy?
... a few more tests ... 'sort -V' is different. But '(n)' seems the same as 'sort -n':aaa,6, aaa,6,howdy aaa,6a aaa,6a,howdy