Unwanted natural sorting of numbers

Miguel Pérez wiseman1024 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 2 17:22:37 UTC 2009


I'm using Midnight Commander 2:4.7.0-pre1-3 from the Debian testing package
on AMD64. Maybe it's something introduced by a Debian patch, or maybe it's
something new in version 4.7.0?


2009/12/2 Milan Cermak <Milan.Cermak at sun.com>

> Which version of midnight commander are you using?
> I don't see such behavior on 4.6.1.
>
> Milan Cermak
>
> Dne  2.12.09 17:11, Miguel Pérez napsal(a):
>
>> Hello,
>>
>>    I've noticed when Midnight Commander sorts filenames alphabetically, it
>> treats numbers specially as to sort filenames "a1", "a3" and "a20" in this
>> order, contrary to the expected "a1", "a20", "a3" order provided by most if
>> not everything else (examples I had readily available: ls, sort, Konqueror
>> file manager, KDE file chooser, Opera's file chooser, Python's
>> sorted(os.listdir('.'))). As a reference, FAR Manager sorts like everything
>> else too. It's just Midnight Commander the one sorting weirdly. (I'm using
>> the "C" collation locale, although as far as I understand this is not
>> dictated by locales.)
>>
>>    While this may look nice on the basis that the number 3 comes before
>> the number 20 and so on (when treated as such!), this is extremely
>> irritating because almost everything else will sort files correctly and
>> contradict Midnight Commander's file sorting. It's even dangerous, as it may
>> lead to user confusion and mistakes that could derive in data loss. Allow me
>> to explain my particular case as an example: I use Midnight Commander as my
>> central file management tool. However, in order to view image files, I've
>> associated my own image viewer with the F3 (view) action for image files.
>> This image viewer allows me to walk forwards and backwards within the
>> directory starting from the file I used to open it, so for example I'm in a
>> directory with files "a1.png", "a3.png" and "a20.png" as seen in Midnight
>> Commander. I hit F3 on "a1.png", and then go forwards to the next file
>> expecting to view what was next in Midnight Commander - "a3.png"; however
>> the image viewer (and any other application I have) will jump to "a20.png"
>> if they're alphabetically sorting files. I may then see something I don't
>> like, and decide to delete the next file to the one I started browsing, so
>> when I'm back to Midnight Commander I go and delete the wrong file
>> ("a3.png").
>>
>>    Could you implement an option to disable this kind of "user-friendly"
>> natural sort algorithm that could easily backfire on users and end up being
>> unfriendly?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
>>
>
> --
> The amount of things I don't know is enormous.
> But I'm grateful for every bit of information.
>
>


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