Why leading zeros do not alter order of files?

Question

In all three cases below (folder, files with zeros only and files with 1), I expect the order to be C-A-B and not A-B-C. Why are leading zeros not considered? It seems to be taking contiguous numbers as a whole entity (thus zero irrelevant) and not as independent characters.

Answer 1

That looks like the "natural sort of (version) numbers" as done by ls -v and sort -V (GNU). The result looks a bit odd here, but the point is to sort 1.1 < 1.2 < 1.11 < 1.12. That is, to look at each sequence of digits as a number instead of individual characters. That naturally means leading zeroes are not significant.

$ touch '00 - A' '000 - B' '0 - C'
$ /bin/ls -v1
00 - A
000 - B
0 - C

Lacking that, the locale settings would of course also affect sorting:

$ LC_ALL=C /bin/ls -1
0 - C
00 - A
000 - B
$ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 /bin/ls -1
000 - B
00 - A
0 - C

You'll have check if the program you're using has any documentation on or settings to modify how it sorts.