On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 11:22:27AM EDT, Bob Proulx wrote: > cga2000 wrote: > > I wanted to sort the output of the ls command by filename and with > > directories first and regular files last. > > > > What I came up with does not quite behave as I expected: > > > > $ ls -al --color=never | sort -k1.1,1.1r -k8f > > You shouldn't ever need --color=never there unless you have aliased ls > with ls --color=always. You don't want ls --color=always (really you > don't) and therefore you won't need to undo it with --color=never.
You're absolutely right. In fact I didn't want to have to worry about the effects of color escape codes on sort field counting at that point and that's why I initially specified --color=never. On my system "ls" is aliased to "ls --color=auto". Regrettably the man page provided on my system lists the three options (never, always, auto) but does not give any explanation as to what they actually do. I did a $ ls -al | sort -k1.1,1.1r -k8f and the output is identical (properly sorted with dots ignored) OTOH, I have the "l" shortcut aliased to "ls -alh --full-time --color=always" and I verified that $ l | sort -k1.1,1.1r -k8f screws up big time .. the output is "sort of" sorted .. Does --color=auto mean add colors when writing to a terminal and don't add them when writing to a file (pipe etc.)..? > > Why does .efile appear together with my other two [Ee]file's rather than > > just below .clewn_keys? > > > > Looks like sort is ignoring the dots .. ?? > > You probably have set a locale setting that ignores punctuation. OK. This is beginning to make "sense". > > Side-effect of the "f" flag specified with my second sort key ..? > > No. > > > Something to do with my locale (en_US)? > > Yes. If a locale is set then the collation sequence for the locale is > used. This is controlled outside of sort (and also ls and bash and > anything else that produces sorted output) and must be respected if > set. > > > http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/#Sort-does-not-sort-in-normal-order_0021 Thanks. Good doc. > Apparently the people who defined the collating sequence for the en_* > locales confused working with data on a computer with working with > text on a computer. The locale collating sequences for en_* ignores > punctuation and folds case by default! Given the symptoms and the nature of sort I would probably never have figured that out myself. That there may be circumstances where this comes in handy I do not doubt .. But as to making it the default for one of (if not the) most widely-used locales? > I have set the following in my environment to restore a standard sort > ordering: > > export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_COLLATE=C I gave up on UTF-8 because I use mostly ELinks for browsing and afaik it's not UTF-8 ready. I tested with LC_ALL=POSIX (as recommended in your document) and the "." was still being ignored. So I issued the above export commands and (magically) data was sorted as data .. Thank you very much for your clarification.
