Re: Collating bug with period?

[Ole Laursen <olau at cs dot aau dot dk>]

Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> writes:

> [Ole Laursen]
> > I can reproduce this on different Red Hat systems. Is this a bug?
> 
> Nope.  It is a feature.  The sorting method is called multilevel
> sorting, and the point seen here is that the first level is letters
> only, and period is ignored at this level.  The result is that "a.a"
> and "aa" is sorted as if both were "aa" on the first level.  The other
> levels are only consulted if the previous levels didn't manage to
> order the strings relative to each other based on the information in
> the previous level.

OK, so I guess the bug here is in "ls" which should try to do
something clever since it is listing filenames where the dot has a
special meaning. I'm having problems with a source code directory
where the files are sorted like this:

  event.C
  eventgenerator.C
  eventgenerator.h
  event.h

But can you explain to me why this sorting behaviour is intended? I
can't make sense of it. :-)

Apparently "-" is in the first level, so with the above files I can get

  event-D
  event.C
  eventgenerator.C
  eventgenerator.h
  event.h

Really weird. I'll report a bug in GTK+ (for the file selector) and in
GNU coreutils.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/