On Sat, Apr 22, 2000 at 08:53:34AM -0400, Brian T. Schellenberger wrote:
->
-> Not an emergency but it's been bugging me for a while and traffic seems
-> to be relatively light right now . . .
->
->
->
-> Throughout most of my Unix life a command like
->
-> ls -d [a-z]
->
-> would list only lower-case files. Sometime fairly recently in Linux
-> this has changed; thus, in one of my directories,
->
-> > ls -d [a-z]
-> I/ K b/ c/ d/ f/ g/ h/ n/ r/ t/ w/ x/
->
-> As you can see, [a-z] includes both upper- and lower-case items. For
-> quite I while I was under the misapprehension that this was because the
-> [-] operator had gotten case-insensitive, but this is not the case:
->
-> > ls -d [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]
-> b/ c/ d/ f/ g/ h/ n/ r/ t/ w/ x/
->
-> So what's happened instead is that the order in which things are search
-> has changed: instead of having a meaning interpretted in ASCII order
-> it's in dictionary order.
->
-> This is not brand-new; it's true in Mandrake 7.0 but it was also true in
-> RedHat 6.1. But it was not true in Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 or RedHat 5.2
-> or any earlier Unix or Unix-like system I ever used before (HP-UX,
-> Solaris, FreeBSD, real BSD).
->
-> I suppose that I can see why this would be done on the grounds of being
-> "intuitive", but it's a lot less useful; with the old interpretation it
-> was easy to express ideas like "lower-case" or "upper-caes" and it only
-> took a few extra keystrokes to get any character range in both cases,
-> but it takes lots to now express "uppercase" or "lowercase".
->
-> Anyway, does anybody know
->
-> - Why this was done?
-> - Who decided to do this?
-> - If there's something that can be done to switch it back?
Interesting. I don't see it on Mandrake 6.1.
As for itme 3, I believe ls is part of bash, so man bash may be the way to
go.
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