Include special characters when sorting files by name (Fedora 12 i386)

gusblake · 02-15-2010, 09:33 AM

Hi,

I am dragging my files over to a new Fedora 12 installation and I just noticed that special characters are not taken into account when sorting files by name (I want '_js' to come before 'images').

Is there a way to make the sorting process behave like Windows, where files starting with a special character are listed first?

Cheers,
Gus

berbae · 02-15-2010, 10:16 AM

Try :

LC_ALL=C sort [FILE]...

gusblake · 02-15-2010, 11:40 AM

Thanks for the reply,

I tried using sort, but that's not what I need - I'm looking for a way to change the order of the directories and files themselves, eg.

in /var/www/html,

images
_js
index.php

should be:

_js (this is at the top because of the underscore)
images
index.php

is this possible?

berbae · 02-15-2010, 03:44 PM

I don't understand exactly what you want to get.
If you want the ls command sorting to be different, try :

LC_ALL=C ls -l

You can also set the LC_ALL system wide, at boot time or at login time.
Look also at the LC_COLLATE environment variable.

If it is something else, I don't see.

catkin · 02-15-2010, 11:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gusblake

I'm looking for a way to change the order of the directories and files themselves

There is no "ordering" of file-and-directory entries in directories. I guess the order is the result of creation and deletion history, programmed for performance. You can see the actual order by using vdir with the -u option.

We are so used to seeing the order presented by shell filename expansion and ls that it's easy to assume the directory itself is ordered.

gusblake · 02-16-2010, 07:54 AM

I've sorted it out now - I just wanted certain directories to appear before others regardless of their names, so I've arranged them by emblems now which does the job.

Cheers,
Gus