First let me start by saying this oddity does not just apply to openSUSE - I have a different Mint machine that also has the same behaviour. In both a visual file manager and in a terminal, the list of documents does not appear to sort correctly (I assume the graphical version is using sort?). Here is my terminal output (a bit mangled by my mail client, sorry): graham@localhost:~/Documents/Programming> ls F# - Beginning F 4.0, 2nd Edition.pdf F# - Expert F 4.0, 4th Edition.pdf F# - for Machine Learning - Essentials.pdf F# - Functional Programming Using F#.pdf F# - High Performance.pdf Fortran - Introduction to Programming using Fortran 95-2003-2008 3rd edition.pdf Fortran - Introduction to Programming with Fortran 3rd edition.pdf Fortran - Self Study F95.pdf F# - Programming F# 3.0.pdf F# - Real-World Functional Programming With Examples in F# and C# 1st Edition.pdf graham@localhost:~/Documents/Programming> ls | sort F# - Beginning F 4.0, 2nd Edition.pdf F# - Expert F 4.0, 4th Edition.pdf F# - for Machine Learning - Essentials.pdf F# - Functional Programming Using F#.pdf F# - High Performance.pdf Fortran - Introduction to Programming using Fortran 95-2003-2008 3rd edition.pdf Fortran - Introduction to Programming with Fortran 3rd edition.pdf Fortran - Self Study F95.pdf F# - Programming F# 3.0.pdf F# - Real-World Functional Programming With Examples in F# and C# 1st Edition.pdf graham@localhost:~/Documents/Programming> ls | sort -f F# - Beginning F 4.0, 2nd Edition.pdf F# - Expert F 4.0, 4th Edition.pdf F# - for Machine Learning - Essentials.pdf F# - Functional Programming Using F#.pdf F# - High Performance.pdf F# - Programming F# 3.0.pdf F# - Real-World Functional Programming With Examples in F# and C# 1st Edition.pdf Fortran - Introduction to Programming using Fortran 95-2003-2008 3rd edition.pdf Fortran - Introduction to Programming with Fortran 3rd edition.pdf Fortran - Self Study F95.pdf So -f seems to get the order right, but as far as I can see there should be no upper/lower case to sort. These files were downloaded; is it possibly some character set issue where the file names look the same but aren't? How do I tell? Thanks.