Say I have a folder with the following files:

001.jpg
002.jpg
003.jpg
004.jpg
005.jpg
3blah.jpg

The file browser in Debian has the annoying habit of not considering the zeroes, so the order in it, and in any image viewers, goes like so:


001.jpg
002.jpg
003.jpg
3blah.jpg
004.jpg
005.jpg

This can be quite annoying. Can I get it to stop doing that?

Thanks.

The file browser may not be sorting the files alphabetically. It may be sorting them by modification time for example. Click on the column heading for file name. That should ensure that it is using file names as its sort key.

I guess some consider this a 'feature' (natural sorting) rather than a 'bug'. It would be nice if it was configurable.

There have been bug reports about this, but people confuse two different issues in the bug report discussions: first is the order of sorting of numerical values; and second is the alphanumeric collation order.

The gnome browser (nautilus) does respect the environment collation order (though I found I had to set LC_COLLATE in .gnomerc). This will affect for example whether alphabetic case follows ASCII order or is interleaved.

However, I could not find a way to change the numerical sorting (which as you point out, sorts according to decimal value rather than strict collation order). This included looking in the settings in gnome-conf, but could not see anything relevant.

Some have solved the problem by switching to a different file browser, such as xfe, but this seems like a heavy-handed solution to me.

Incidentally, Microsoft made the same change in Windows Explorer (WinXP and later). It is especially annoying when the numbers in the filenames are in hex.

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Yeah, and I've found it annoying in Windows as well, but it bugs me a lot less because I use an exceedingly old image viewer (ACDSee version 3.1; that's nineties-era) whose own browser still sorts files the old-fashioned way. This is unfeasible under Linux though, or at least I haven't yet found a viewer that works like that.

You could try the geeqie viewer (a fork from the unmaintained gqview), if you can live without all the bells and whistles.