"... setting LANG=en_US then people post bugs to the GNU coreutils
about it claiming it is a bug. See the archives there and you will
see it is one of the most often reported non-bugs in ls and sort."

I was using the GNU coreutils sort and it seemed to be ignoring dashes
 in the sorting under debian. My friend who uses freebsd was not experiencing this. 

Finally I found the above quote on a debian mailing list. I added this to my 
bash script ahead of where sort was used:

LANG=

on a line by itself.

The mailing list archive also mentioned that the LANG=en_US could "mess up" perl and other things.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/06/msg00637.html