Leading spaces are common, actually [LWN.net]

Leading spaces are common, actually

Posted Mar 26, 2009 21:23 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Leading spaces are common, actually by njs
Parent article: Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

Finder does not ignore spaces. I'm quite glad, because I use the space-prefix trick rather regularly. I am occasionally annoyed at how GNU ls sorts "A B" between "AA" and "AC" instead of before them: that's certainly not how my brain sorts.

Finder does however sort numbers like this, which GNU ls does not: 1 2 10

I don't really see what the point of the "human-style" sorting is if it can't even sort numbers. That seems kind of basic to me.

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Leading spaces are common, actually

Posted Mar 28, 2009 1:21 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Sorting numerically in GNU ls is done by 'ls -v'.

(By default, despite comments elsewhere in this thread, ls sorts
ASCIIbetically, so " 2" comes before "1".)

Leading spaces are common, actually

Posted Mar 28, 2009 1:57 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

> Sorting numerically in GNU ls is done by 'ls -v'.

Huh, never knew that, interesting! Never would have found that from the man page, which says "-v sort by version". That seems a remarkably poor description of what it actually does.

> (By default, despite comments elsewhere in this thread, ls sorts ASCIIbetically, so " 2" comes before "1".)

Well, not exactly: GNU ls has a default sort which depends on the locale's collation settings, and most systems default to a locale like en_US.UTF-8, so most people have it sorting in a case/accent-insensitive manner by default on their systems.

Leading spaces are common, actually

Posted Mar 28, 2009 20:36 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's called 'sort by version' because the function it calls (strverscmp())
was designed to sort version numbers, and because the expected use of
ls -v was sorting a directory full of version-named directories in version
order.

(And you're right on the collation sort thing: I spoke carelessly.)