The question in the header refers, of course, to the options found under "Sort Order." Frankly, I can not tell the difference between the meanings of these two options -- unless perhaps I would take a deep dive into the source code. The man page does not seem to provide enlightenment on this point, either.
I have found out that the two options can sometimes act slightly differently, perhaps depending on distro or hardware, or something even more mysterious. The usual occasion on which I would wish to sort files by date instead of by name occurs when I would connect to some repository and I want to get the most recent files in a certain directory. I have always used "modify time" to do the sorting, and it worked perfectly. But recently I tried to do this using an ARM netbook. The "modify time" then produced no change in the listing order of the files at all. But when I tried "change time" instead, I got the desired results. Now, as well as being built on ARM architecture, the netbook is also running a different distro from the rest of my machines. Thus, the important factor might possibly be the configuration of the distro, or it could be due to some quirk of the ARM architecture. However, I still can not tell what the difference between "Modify time" and "Change time" was supposed to be in the first place, nor, for that matter, why both of these are separately listed as options when their names seem to mean the same thing with synonymous words. It seems to me to be something which is either redundant or confusing, or possibly both. Therefore, I thought it might be good to ask. Theodore Kilgore _______________________________________________ mc mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc