On 10/3/18, Roberto C. Sánchez <robe...@debian.org> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 03, 2018 at 01:51:54PM -0400, Lee wrote: >> >> Sure - I can understand some people wanting A a to sort together. But >> ignoring non-alpha characters when sorting??? Eventually I'm sure I >> can get used to >> Music >> old >> Pictures >> >> but this order is obnoxious >> .mozilla >> Music >> old >> Pictures >> .profile >> Public >> > > While it may not particularly intuitive, I would not call it obnoxious. > In English, the '.' would not customarily be used to make lexical > sorting decisions. > > Dr. Jiles > Dr Jones > Dr. Jurgenson > > That would be the sort order I expect (for English, or most any other > natural language locale).
Which is probably why I'm having such a hard time accepting the en_US.utf8 sort order. I want the "computer" rules, not the natural language rules. > Either of > > Dr Jones > Dr. Jiles > Dr. Jurgenson > > or > > Dr. Jiles > Dr. Jurgenson > Dr Jones > > would seem incorrect to me. <grin> what seems incorrect to me is that the data isn't normalized. I'd do something like sed -e 's/^Dr /Dr. /' | sort > I suspect that collation function has no > way of knowing whether the punctuation is important or not, so it must > adhere to the rules specified in the locale (to ignore it in this case). > You could always write a custom locale that sorts punctuation before or > after letters, as you like. The locale(5) man page would be a good > place to start for that. ok - I'll take a look >> I don't think I'll ever get used to that. I'm just a bit concerned >> that setting LC_COLLATE=C is going to break something & I'll have a >> heck of a time figuring out it was because I changed the sort order. >> > > Call me old school, but I have LC_COLLATE=C in every shell profile on > every machine that I use. I find that sorting is most important to me > at the shell prompt (and usually when using ls). There has never been > instance where I encountered an oddity that I even suspected related to > my choice of LC_COLLATE. Good to know! Thank you Lee
