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10.1.4 More details about version sort

The version sort takes into account the fact that file names frequently include indices or version numbers. Standard sorting functions usually do not produce the ordering that people expect because comparisons are made on a character-by-character basis. The version sort addresses this problem, and is especially useful when browsing directories that contain many files with indices/version numbers in their names:

 
      > ls -1            > ls -1v
      foo.zml-1.gz       foo.zml-1.gz
      foo.zml-100.gz     foo.zml-2.gz
      foo.zml-12.gz      foo.zml-6.gz
      foo.zml-13.gz      foo.zml-12.gz
      foo.zml-2.gz       foo.zml-13.gz
      foo.zml-25.gz      foo.zml-25.gz
      foo.zml-6.gz       foo.zml-100.gz

Note also that numeric parts with leading zeroes are considered as fractional one:

 
      > ls -1            > ls -1v
      abc-1.007.tgz      abc-1.007.tgz
      abc-1.012b.tgz     abc-1.01a.tgz
      abc-1.01a.tgz      abc-1.012b.tgz



This document was generated by Jeff Bailey on December, 28 2002 using texi2html