Sorting order for ls changed

jbo5112 · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2005 Posts: 19

I recompiled my kernel (2.6.17 w/ reiser4 patch) with some different options set on nfs, and rebooted my machine from work. Now that I'm home, the command "ls" (aliased to "ls -F --color=auto") does a case insensitive sort on filenames. I tried "shopt -u nocaseglob" with no luck fixing it. This is driving me nuts, and I don't have the slightest clue what caused the change. I don't even know for sure how long it has been doing this.

I counted on the capital letters coming before the other letters, but now "main.cpp" comes before "Makefile"

. I've already spent all week dealing trying to track down weird bugs in a computer program, and had weird problems with cygwin at work. Now I've got some strange setting that is messing with my 'ls'. It only happens when I open some sort of xterm (tried xterm, Eterm, aterm and konsole). It doesn't happen when I login from a virtual terminal on the console, or run "su -", or even run "su - <myaccount>" back from root.

This might have been covered somewhere by someone else (most problems are), but the few possible solutions I've found are dead ends. I miss my case sensitive search. :cry:

RiBBiT · Apprentice Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 215 Location: Sweden

Perhaps you changed your locale settings? It's the LC_COLLATE environmental variable that should determine the ordering.

jbo5112 · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2005 Posts: 19

Thanks! It didn't work, but it helped me figure out a quick and dirty fix. If I unset LANG and LC_ALL, then it gives me the traditional sorting I want. I'm sure at some point I'll figure out what they should be set to, but this works for now.

BitJam · Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 5:54 pm Post subject:

Here is the proper way: Keep LC_ALL unset. Think of it as an emergency override. use LC_COLLATE=C to keep directory listings in ASCII order (uppercase before lowercase). Then set LANG to your language of choice. For example in my .zshrc (same for .bashrc) I have: