The Macos Lc_collate Hunt: or Why Does Sort Order Differently on Macos and Linux (2020)

The right way is the one that you choose yourself and suits your needs.

There's no default right answer to this, as the answer depends entirely on what you're sorting and how you want it sorted. Even for a given character set the "correct" alphabetical sorting is still locale dependent.

And even knowing all that, "correct" programmatic sorting might still be essentially impossible. Some digraphs may be sorted differently depending on the specific word. For example A vs Aa, where Aa means Å. But Aa won't always necessarily mean Å, so good luck figuring that out.

I wondered the same. What's the right ordering?

And that's why there are a hundred different possible values for LC_COLLATE, and it's completely normal that two popular Unix distributions picked different default values for that setting...right?

It would have been reasonable to conclude the article a third of the way through, and say "sorting is locale-dependent, if what you value is consistent behaviour between different OSs (instead of sorting based on the user's preferences) you need to implement the sorting yourself."

Before the Danish language adopted the letter "å" (in 1948), the vowel was written as "aa". In the Danish alphabet, "å" is the last letter. Therefore a list of three Danish city names would be correctly sorted as:

  * Albertslund
  * Odense
  * Aarhus

This feels like material for another Tom Scott video.

It isn't even language/nation dependent, there are also different official sorting orders in a single language dependent on the context, e.g. phone book vs. dictionary.

And then a lot of languages are used in different countries with different rules.

Beyond that, are what/why you are sorting... should File1.foo come before File005.foo or file020.foo? I've honestly thought about creating my own file manager just to case-insensitively sort files where sequences of numbers are padded to the same length, and only if there's an identical match is case-sensitivity put lower first, then upper on first original difference.

My worry is that it would perform badly on really large directories... That said, for where it's a pain, it would be helpful to say the least.