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Accepted
Martin Ueding
Asked: 2011-06-09 11:34:31 +0800 CST

Tell `ls` to sort by regular ASCII codes, not "intelligently"

  • 772

I have a couple files and ls sorts them like this:

a
_b
c

but I want to have

_b
a
c

How can I do that?

ls

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As a one-off command you can do this:

    LC_COLLATE=C ls

    Or you can add export LC_COLLATE="C" to your .bashrc to make it permanent (may have unexpected results sorting elsewhere).

    More information on Ubuntu forums.

    • 9

  2. Just in case there isn't a built-in way to do this, you could use a simple replacement for sort:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

for i in sorted(sys.stdin):
    sys.stdout.write(i)

    Save it, for example, at /bin/pysort and make it executable (sudo cp whatever.py /bin/pysort and sudo chmod a+x /bin/pysort), and run it as ls | pysort:

    stefano@lenovo:~/t$ ls | pysort
_b
a
c
    • 6

  3. would ls | sort not do exactly what you need?

    • 1