Re: [Nautilus-list] bug or feature? file list order

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Jens Ansorg wrote:
> just noticed an something odd:
> 
> i have some files and directories whose names start with _ (underscore)
> 
> Now, nautilus kind of ignores this "letter" and sorts the files/dirs
> using the following letter, i.e.
> 
> admin
> cgi-bin
> _diary
> graphics
> _links
> styles
> _travel
> 
> what I would expect is an sort order like
> 
> _diary
> _links
> _travel
> admin
> cgi-bin
> ... etc.
> 
> at least that seems logical to me and that's what I'm used from other
> OSes
> 
> any chance to change this behaviour?

Short answer: Feature.

Long answer: Nautilus is using the sorting rules from your glibc locale
for sorting. If you are using de_DE (type "locale" in a console if you
are unsure), you most likely also have German sorting. And with sorting
is meant "strict lexigraphical sorting", the type of sorting that has
been used by librarians for several centuries, not some invented scheme
like the old C rules previously commonly used in the UNIX world.

I only know the Swedish (sv_SE) sorting rules, but I believe they are
similar to the German ones.
First of all, sorting is not case-sensitive. A file named "Testfile" and
one named "testfile" will be sorted immediately next to each other, no
matter how many other files there are in the directory. Exactly the way
it is done in a literature index.
Secondly, non-alphabetic and non-numeric characters make no difference
to sorting. In the lexigraphical sense, these characters simply have no
internal ordering, and cannot be sorted. They are removed from the
string that is to be sorted, so that the sorting can be based on the
symbols that can actually be sorted. So the ignoring of the underscore
in your example with regards to sorting is entirely correct.

If you are used to the old UNIX way of sorting from other operating
systems, even though you used German on those, well then those operating
systems were simply broken in this aspect.


If you still want the other behavior, it should be simple to fix. Most
locale stuff is controlled by the LC_* environment variables. LC_COLLATE
is the one that controls sorting, so you can choose sorting preference
independantly from language preference, for example.

To select C sorting in an otherwise de_DE environment:

unset LC_ALL		# LC_ALL "sets all" the LC_* variables to
			# the same value, since you want different
			# values we have to unset this one
export LC_COLLATE=C	# Set sorting preference to the C "locale",
			# a sorting identical to ASCII sorting
locale			# To verify that variables were set as
			# expected


You can put this (except for the "locale" command) in your login script,
and the next time you login Nautilus should hopefully sort as you're
used to.


Christian