Parece que você está usando uma localidade não POSIX.
Tente:
export LC_ALL=C
e, em seguida, sort
.
info sort
diz claramente:
(1) If you use a non-POSIX locale (e.g., by setting 'LC_ALL' to 'en_US'), then 'sort' may produce output that is sorted differently than you're accustomed to. In that case, set the 'LC_ALL' environment variable to 'C'. Note that setting only 'LC_COLLATE' has two problems. First, it is ineffective if 'LC_ALL' is also set. Second, it has undefined behavior if 'LC_CTYPE' (or 'LANG', if 'LC_CTYPE' is unset) is set to an incompatible value. For example, you get undefined behavior if 'LC_CTYPE' is 'ja_JP.PCK' but 'LC_COLLATE' is 'en_US.UTF-8'.