Re: Collating order

[Ole Laursen]

address@hidden (Bob Proulx) writes:

> > I guess the problem is that the dot has a different meaning in the
> > context of file names so "ls" should try to do something clever like
> > splitting the extension from the basename and sort the basenames
> > first.
> 
> The dot has no special meaning in filenames.  It is no different than
> any other character.  The only two special characters are / and \0,
> neither of which can appear in filenames.
>
> By convention filenames with a leading dot are hidden files.  In very
> new versions of ls you can control the pattern of hidden files such as
> to include files starting with a comma as being hidden.

I know that to the shell and everything else the dot is not special
unless it appears in the beginning of the name.

But also by convention a dot signifies a file extension.

> You can control the sorting order in ls and sort through the use of
> the LANG, LC_COLLATE and LC_ALL variables.  If you don't want
> internationalization then you can unset all of those or set the
> appropriate ones to C.  All of unset or set to C or set to POSIX would
> set a standard C/POSIX locale.

But I do want an internationalised sort order. I want it to respect
the characters that are specific for Danish. I just don't want
filenames with the same basename but different extensions to be mixed
up in that way. :-)

If you take a step back, do you really think that the sorting

  event.C
  eventgenerator.C
  eventgenerator.h
  event.h

is the most useful?

Of course, if you don't want to do anything about it, I will stop
wasting your time,

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/