Sorting filenames

Posted Sep 17, 2015 10:52 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: Sorting filenames by epa
Parent article: A status update on Debian's reproducible builds

> (I never understood why tools like sort and tar, which are hardly anything an end user would use directly, had to start doing locale sort by default rather than just byte order, which works sanely enough for both ASCII and UTF-8. But I guess it's too late to change now.)

I actually use sort and tar as an "end user" a lot, BUT I agree with you that locale-awareness should be a nondefault option. My default locale is non-english, non-US, but mostly I want things sorted bytewise... There are a lot "env LANG= something-or-other" in my work scripts.

Sorting filenames

Posted Sep 17, 2015 19:01 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

If you generally want a specific non-C locale, but you want sorting based on the C locale, you can set LC_COLLATE=C. I personally do that because most "natural language" locales don't preserve the classic UNIX "sort capital before lowercase" behavior that makes it useful to name files README or Makefile.