mint-bash weirdness

[Giles Orr]

I have a favourite function/alias that I install on all Debian-based
systems:

function dpkgs () { dpkg-query -W
--showformat='${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n; }

dpkgs outputs out a list of all packages on the system with their size, and
sorts them from smallest to largest.  Very useful on space-limited
systems.  I've been using it for years without problems. But in the last
few days I've been playing with both Debian Jesse and Debian-Mint (with
Cinnamon) inside VirtualBox.  No problem with Debian, I just drop the
function into /etc/bash.bashrc as usual.  But on Mint it just prints:

Size
Size
Size
...

for as many packages as are installed.  This is an indication of some form
of bad parsing on the part of Mint, I can't remember exactly what (I've
seen it before: the quoting in the command makes it hard to turn it into an
alias).  But what I'm really not getting is: why does this work on Debian
and not on Mint?  And just as odd, it works from the Mint command line, but
not in the Mint /etc/bash.bashrc.

Perhaps they recompiled bash with different options?  Or set the command
line options differently?  I'm not entirely sure how to check that, or why
they would do that.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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