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
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