Nautilus: Completely Strange Sort Order

[gacl]

Hello, all,

The sort order in Nautilus is completely strange. What should be:

004
02
030
1
10

shows up as:

1
02
004
10
030

As far as I've been able to investigate this is a _years_ old bug which remains unfixed. Any workarounds? This is incredibly annoying!

Thanks.

Gus

[coffeecat]

I hate to tell you this but Windows 7 and MacOS (arrange in name order) display them in the same order.

[gacl]

Well, I've never used Windows 7 or MacOS and I've never encountered such a sort order before. All my files (which figure in the thousands) have been named accordingly. I've actually been unable to find files that I know are there because of this. I mean, when we add numbers, letters, and symbols it's completely impossible to find anything. I need this solved, please.

Once again, this is a bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355152. Any sensible workarounds?

Gus

[coffeecat]

That's an interesting bug report. I can see the logic in the way Nautilus (and Windows and MacOS) are sorting file names, but I can see the reason why people would want strict ASCII sorting.

I'm posting from Kubuntu Natty Alpha at the moment. I'm no great fan of KDE but I like to see how KDE4 is progressing. Dolphin, the KDE file manager, displays files sorted in the way you prefer. So does something called 'rekonq', which I guess is some sort of konqueror respin - you can tell how much I use KDE!

Using KDE instead of Gnome is not much of a workaround, but this has intrigued me enough to try Xubuntu and see what Xfce's Thunar makes of all this.

[coffeecat]

I tried booting from a Xubuntu 10.10 live CD. Thunar sorts the files in the same way as Nautilus, Windows and MacOS, so unfortunately installing Thunar in gnome won't help you.

[gacl]

I tried this (http://www.subdude-site.com/WebPages_Local/RefInfo/Computer/Linux/LinuxGuidesByBlaze/Nautilus_Guide/NautilusGuideBlaze.htm), but it didn't work. Maybe .gnomerc is not being read?

Gus

[asmoore82]

As far as I've been able to investigate this is a _years_ old bug which remains unfixed. Any workarounds? This is incredibly annoying!

Bug: No!

Workaround: Yes!


Once again, this is a bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355152. Any sensible workarounds?

This is not a bug, this is by design: groups of digits are sorted in numeric order.

"groups of digits" is the key phrase. If you don't want the groups
of digits recognized as larger numbers, simply un-group them:

for file in *.*
do
ext="${file##*.}"
name="${file%.*}"
new="$( echo "$name" | sed 's/./& /g' )"
mv -iv "$file" "$new.$ext"
done

[Krytarik]

Wouldn't that fix your problem?:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10431724

It's also a post by asmoore82, I wonder why he/she didn't mention that in your case. But it has of course some negative side-effects, regarding case-sensitive sorting.

[asmoore82]

Wouldn't that fix your problem?:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10431724

It's also a post by asmoore82, I wonder why he/she didn't mention that in your case. But it has of course some negative side-effects, regarding case-sensitive sorting.

I tested and had to go back and add to that post, even with LC_COLLATE=C,
nautilus still detects numbers and sorts them in ascending order.

I agree w/all that nautilus needs some user preferences for sorting, but
folks need to stop filing bug reports w/Gnome and instead file a "feature request."
Whining about "what Windows Explorer does" in the bug reports isn't constructive either.

[phibuntu]

Same problem here

setting "LC_COLLATE=C" in an executable file called "~/.gnomerc" does not help; or is completely ignoed.

Using Ubuntu 11.04, GNOME nautilus 2.32.2.1

Unfortunately libreoffice and others open a nautilus-Window to choose import files (like images).


Any workaround?