Hi all,

I've published a samba share on a Ubuntu 8.10 server, and mounted the share on a windows box. For some strange reason the files are not sorted by file name (nor by any other sorting type) if I list them from the Windows command line (dir). I could always use the "dir /on" parameter, but I hope there's a way to make samba sort the files for me.

Issueing the ls command from a linux shell in the same directory does produce a nicely name-sorted list.

I believe the sorting is done by the OS that's on the share and not Samba.

Think you'll have to use 'DIR /ON' in DOS.

If that's true, then I don't understand why a dir command on the local NTFS volume (any directory) of the Windows box always produces a neatly filename-ordered list.

I think rizhun is right, samba is nor responsible for sorting

thnks

To sum up what we have here:
- Local NTFS using 'dir' command w/o parameters: sorted by name
- Samba (ext3) using 'dir' command w/o parameters: no sorting whatsoever
- Same ext3 dir using 'ls' command w/o parameters: sorted by name

Been doing some reading, and I think I know why the above happens. NTFS has a so-called "Master File Table" (MFT), which describes all file properties per directory. The 'dir' command uses this information to build the file list, and apparently the files are sorted by name in the MFT. The ext3 volume does not seem to have a MFT equivalent, I think the 'ls' command does the sorting by name by default, at least --help seems to indicate that:

--sort=WORD: sort by WORD instead of name: none -U, extension -X, size -S, time -t, version -v

A 'dir' command on the ext3 (samba) FS will not find an MFT nor will it perform sorting by default, so files are shown in the order they're actually stored on disk.

Please correct me if I've gone horribly wrong somewhere.