ls -v (natural number sorting) command sorts capitalized files/dirs ahead of non-capitalized files/dirs

Question

I'd like to have natural sorting of numbers, but capitalized files/dirs not sorted at the top. Is that possible?

Currently ls -lv produces:

FOO/
bar/
ZEBRA.x
foo.x
foo-1.x
foo-2.x
foo-10.x

I messed around with |sort ... but (1) nothing I tried worked and (2) it removed --color=auto from my ls command. I'm sure there's a fix for the color, but I have no idea what it is.

EDIT

In my testing, LC_COLLATE=C ls -l does the same thing as ls -lv.

Answer 1

You could always use zsh's numericglobsort or n glob qualifier instead.

$ locale title
English locale for Britain
$ print -rC1 -- *(Nn)
bar
FOO
foo-1.x
foo-2.x
foo-10.x
foo.x
ZEBRA.x

$ () { local LC_COLLATE=C; print -rC1 -- *(Nn); }
FOO
ZEBRA.x
bar
foo-1.x
foo-2.x
foo-10.x
foo.x

With GNU ls:

ls -U -ld --color -- *(n)

For ls not to sort (and list files in the order they were given by zsh's glob expansion).

If your locale's sort order is case sensitive like in the C locale, you can also do:

$ locale title
ISO/IEC 14652 i18n FDCC-set
$ print -rC1 -- *(Nnoe['REPLY=$REPLY:l'])
bar
FOO
foo-1.x
foo-2.x
foo-10.x
foo.x
ZEBRA.x

Were we use the oe glob qualifier to rewrite the names to lower case for ordering by evaluating the REPLY=$REPLY:l expression.

With GNU sort, -V (for version sort) can be combined with -f (case insensitive matching), but that assumes file names don't contain newline characters, and that only works for ASCII letters:

$ ls | LC_COLLATE=C sort -Vf
bar
ETE
FOO
foo.x
foo-1.x
foo-2.x
foo-10.x
ZEBRA.x
Á
ÉTÉ
á
été

Answer 2

Sorting in ls depends on your locale settings, however, unfortunately this is not considered when using ls -v and sort -V.

Check LC_COLLATE="C" ls -l and see the same "issue".

This functionality is implemented using gnulib's filevercmp function, which has some caveats worth noting.

• LC_COLLATE is ignored, which means ‘ls -v’ and ‘sort -V’ will sort non-numeric prefixes as if the LC_COLLATE locale category was set to ‘C’.

(via)

It means it will be sorted in ASCII order.

See also:

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#Version-sort-ignores-locale

---

However, you could e.g. use python to sort your versions:

Install natsort module, e.g. if you have pip installed:

pip3 install natsort

Put the following in a python script (e.g. sortv.py):

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from natsort import humansorted
import sys
for line in humansorted(sys.stdin):
    print(line.rstrip())

Then run ls -1f | python /path/to/sortv.py.

This is nowhere perfect, it does not care about directories vs files, it should just show what you can do. Better would be to implement the whole thing in python and not pipe from ls which should never be parsed!

E.g.:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import os
from natsort import humansorted
for (path, dirs, files) in os.walk('.'):
    for d in dirs:
        print('\033[94m{}\033[0m'.format(d))
    for f in humansorted(f):
        print(f)
    break