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fmeier
Asked: 2018-12-22 23:25:45 +0800 CST

Sorting files and folders with underscore at the beginning

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I use an underscore at the beginning of file and folder names to mark them as something "special". But this sorting doesn't work for the most programs under Linux. I tried LC_COLLATE=C ls and other locales but the results are something strange. Let's say I have these folders:

2
A
_F
G
K
S
x4

This is the sort order of ls. When I use LC_COLLATE=C ls, I have this:

2
A
G
K
S
_F
x4

I have this under Xubuntu 18.04 using the xfce-terminal-emulator on 2 machines.

What is wrong here?

command-line locale xubuntu ls

2 Answers

  1. You can sort files with leading underscores to the end with --sort=version or -v which is equivalent to sort -V (natural version sort) (which is most useful for sorting files with numbers).

    $ ls -v1
2
A
G
K
S
x4
_F

    Details on version sorting are in info ls... note that:

    ‘LC_COLLATE’ is ignored, which means ‘ls -v’ and ‘sort -V’ will
 sort non-numeric prefixes as if the ‘LC_COLLATE’ locale category
 was set to ‘C’.

    Perhaps this is adequate for your purpose.

    • 2

  2. @Zanna's answer provides one solution. Another solution is this:

    $ ls -lfr -1 _* [!_]*
_F
2
A
G
K
S
x4
    • 1