Re: Unwanted natural sorting of numbers

[Milan Cermak <Milan Cermak Sun COM>]

Which version of midnight commander are you using?
I don't see such behavior on 4.6.1.

Milan Cermak

Dne  2.12.09 17:11, Miguel Pérez napsal(a):
> Hello,
>
>     I've noticed when Midnight Commander sorts filenames alphabetically, 
> it treats numbers specially as to sort filenames "a1", "a3" and "a20" in 
> this order, contrary to the expected "a1", "a20", "a3" order provided by 
> most if not everything else (examples I had readily available: ls, sort, 
> Konqueror file manager, KDE file chooser, Opera's file chooser, Python's 
> sorted(os.listdir('.'))). As a reference, FAR Manager sorts like 
> everything else too. It's just Midnight Commander the one sorting 
> weirdly. (I'm using the "C" collation locale, although as far as I 
> understand this is not dictated by locales.)
>
>     While this may look nice on the basis that the number 3 comes before 
> the number 20 and so on (when treated as such!), this is extremely 
> irritating because almost everything else will sort files correctly and 
> contradict Midnight Commander's file sorting. It's even dangerous, as it 
> may lead to user confusion and mistakes that could derive in data loss. 
> Allow me to explain my particular case as an example: I use Midnight 
> Commander as my central file management tool. However, in order to view 
> image files, I've associated my own image viewer with the F3 (view) 
> action for image files. This image viewer allows me to walk forwards and 
> backwards within the directory starting from the file I used to open it, 
> so for example I'm in a directory with files "a1.png", "a3.png" and 
> "a20.png" as seen in Midnight Commander. I hit F3 on "a1.png", and then 
> go forwards to the next file expecting to view what was next in Midnight 
> Commander - "a3.png"; however the image viewer (and any other 
> application I have) will jump to "a20.png" if they're alphabetically 
> sorting files. I may then see something I don't like, and decide to 
> delete the next file to the one I started browsing, so when I'm back to 
> Midnight Commander I go and delete the wrong file ("a3.png").
>
>     Could you implement an option to disable this kind of 
> "user-friendly" natural sort algorithm that could easily backfire on 
> users and end up being unfriendly?
>
> Thanks
>
>
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