Re: ls bug?

[Bob Proulx]

> I've just installed linux 2.4.4 and, much to my dismay, noticed the
> behaviour of ls has changed. Indeed, it would seem the leading dot in
> dotfiles is ignored when ls sorts its output. The result is a mess of
> regular files interspersed with dotfiles. I hope you realize how much of
> an impact this can have on scripts which rely on the standard behaviour
> of ls.

Thanks for the report.  It matches a common pattern.  This is not due
to a bug, but to the fact that you have set environment variables that
direct the program to use locale specific sorting tables.  You or your
vendor have probably set environment variables like LANG, LC_ALL, or
LANG to en_US.  There appears to be a problem with that table which is
not part of the GNU program but part of your vendor's system release.

Unset them, and then set LC_ALL to POSIX

  # If you use bash or some other Bourne-based shell,
  export LC_ALL=POSIX

  # If you use a C-shell,
  setenv LC_ALL POSIX

and it will then work the way you expect.

See the standards documentation for more information on LC_*
variables.

  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/ls.html

Bob