Patch for dot-files sort order under glibc 2.2

Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov D.Yu.Bolkhovityanov at inp.nsk.su
Fri Jul 13 09:25:01 UTC 2001


On 11 Jul 01 at 14:28, proski at gnu.org wrote:

> Hi, Dmitry!
>
> >     The idea is trivial -- "ad" and "bd" flags change from boolean to
> > integers (they are integers anyway, because of "bd-ad"), and "ISDIR" gets
> > bigger weight than "is-dot-file".
>
> The problem is not specific to the dot. Files beginning with other
> punctuation characters, such as "=" are also sorted by the first letter:
>
> $ ls -1
> bar
> =foo
> ;foo
> foo1

    Well, yes, it is a problem.  Very stupid, BTW, and as conversation in
russian locale-maillist shown, it is a known but little thought of issue.
I'll try to investigate this question.

    Anyway, dot-files are so special that probably making at least *them*
sort correctly is a good reason for applying this patch.  BTW, it isn't a
hack at all -- we don't treate separate sorting of directories as a hack,
right?  And from users' point of view hidden files are just like dirs (and
in other OSes "hidden" is even an attribute, exactly like "dir").

    I made a quick poll among our users (I'm a sysadmin of our institute's
network).  The result is that they can survive mixing case-differing names,
but spreading dot-files throughout the directory is absolutely unacceptable.

       ___________________________________________________________________
       Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov  |  Novosibirsk, RUSSIA
       phone (383-2)-39-49-56     |  The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
                                  |  Lab. 5-13




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