In strace I can see openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib64/xine/plugins/2.7", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_CLOEXEC|O_DIRECTORY) = 3 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/lib64/xine/plugins/2.7/post", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_CLOEXEC|O_DIRECTORY) = 4 so it is listing files in these directories and the order varies by filesystem. The | perl -ne 'print join(";",sort(split(";")))' that I added to xine-ui earlier did hide most of the problems, but it seems not all. xine-list should really process entries in deterministic order.