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10.1.4 Details about version sort

Version sorting handles the fact that file names frequently include indices or version numbers. Standard sorting usually does not produce the order that one expects because comparisons are made on a character-by-character basis. Version sorting is especially useful when browsing directories that contain many files with indices/version numbers in their names:

$ ls -1            $ ls -1v
abc.zml-1.gz       abc.zml-1.gz
abc.zml-12.gz      abc.zml-2.gz
abc.zml-2.gz       abc.zml-12.gz

Version-sorted strings are compared such that if ver1 and ver2 are version numbers and prefix and suffix (suffix matching the regular expression ‘(\.[A-Za-z~][A-Za-z0-9~]*)*’) are strings then ver1 < ver2 implies that the name composed of “prefix ver1 suffix” sorts before “prefix ver2 suffix”.

Note also that leading zeros of numeric parts are ignored:

$ ls -1            $ ls -1v
abc-1.007.tgz      abc-1.01a.tgz
abc-1.012b.tgz     abc-1.007.tgz
abc-1.01a.tgz      abc-1.012b.tgz

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