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I'm having issues with programs reading files in the wrong order, and also outputting in an undesirable order with utilities such as ls.

I've tried some of the LC_COLLATE options, but none of them fit the preference I seek, so I figured there must be something more I can do.

Examples of commands producing wrong order:

user@host: /home/user/Video $ mpv *.mkv

There are 150 files in /home/user/Video, and here are the first 12 a command from a program like mpv *.mkv would read:

TVSeriesName - 01.mkv
TVSeriesName - 02.mkv
TVSeriesName - 03.mkv
TVSeriesName - 04.mkv
TVSeriesName - 05.mkv
TVSeriesName - 06.mkv
TVSeriesName - 07.mkv
TVSeriesName - 08.mkv
TVSeriesName - 09.mkv
TVSeriesName - 10.mkv
TVSeriesName - 100.mkv
TVSeriesName - 101.mkv

It's reading 100 before it reads 11, even with leading zero.

Ideally, it should read them in the correct 1-150 order even without a leading zero.

What I want is to have a universal order in which files are read and sorted that resembles the default of the ranger file manager.

Example:

.1-hiddendir/
.2-hiddendir/
.a-hiddendir/
.b-hiddendir/
.C-hiddendir/
.d-hiddendir/
.E-hiddendir/
1-dir/
2-dir/
A-dir/
b-dir/
c-dir/
D-dir/
.1-dotfile
.2-dotfile
.a-dotfile
.b-dotfile
.C-dotfile
1-file
2-file
a-file
B-file
c-file

OS: Arch Linux, FS: ext4

What can I do with environment settings, or anything, in a Linux distribution to achieve this?

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  • 2
    Surely you want two leading zeroes? – Michael Homer Mar 27 '16 at 2:05
  • you need to rename your files so that they ALL have the SAME number of digits in the numeric portion of the filename, left-padded with zeroes. e.g. if you have more than 99 files, you'll need three digits: 001, 011, 100, etc. if more than 999, then 4 digits: 0001, 0011, 0100, etc. – cas Mar 27 '16 at 2:10
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    I don't want two leading zeroes. I'm looking for consistency, and I'm asking this question because I believe there must be some way for the shell or filesystem to determine order other than by having matching number of digits for all files in a directory. – nixon Mar 27 '16 at 2:22
  • I don't see why it seemed surprising that one didn't work, is all. I don't think the locale can have that sort of collation behaviour, but I would be interested to find out. – Michael Homer Mar 27 '16 at 3:00
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    "The order in which files are read by programs" is the order you told them to, not anything to do with the program reading them. I suspect you'd have to write your own locale to get general sorting to behave that way, and I'm not sure it's even possible to do it then. A more focused question on that topic might be more likely to be seen by someone who knows about doing that. – Michael Homer Mar 27 '16 at 6:22
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find . -maxdepth 1 -type f  -name '*.mkv' -print0 | sort -Vz | xargs -0r mpv

This uses find to output a NUL-separated of list all filenames matching '*.mkv' in the current directory, then GNU sort (with -z or --zero-terminated for NUL-separated input and -V or --version-sort to sort the filenames), and finally, xargs -0r mpv to run mpv with all the filenames in sorted order as the arguments.

This will work with any filename, even those with spaces, line-feeds, or shell meta-characters in the name.

AFAIK, only GNU sort and FreeBSD's sort currently support the -z or --zero-terminated option.

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