What you have found, excepting the '-f' difference, is the brain-dead brokenness of 'sort', at least since the garbage definition of the English locales were incorporated into it. The locale is supposed to make strings sort in a way that is sensible for *people*, but as you can see, the results of the first sorts you show do not make it easy for people to locate items in a "sorted" list.
If you remove the string '# -' from the items, does it look sorted now? I seem to remember that the En locales do case folding anyway, which could explain 'f' occurring after 'F' in the outputs.
Now, if you want to experiment, just randomly put that same string into your items at various places, and check that it doesn't affect the sort order.
The most wonderful case ;-) is to have items prefixed with such strings, and then enjoy looking them up once they are sorted.
I don't know what's up with the '-f' difference.
--
Robert Webb
On Tuesday, August 30, 2022, 04:46:26 PM PDT, Graham Stephens wrote:
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.
