coreutils: Additional hard-coded priorities in GNU coreutils' version sort
30.3.2 Additional hard-coded priorities in GNU coreutils’ version sort
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In GNU coreutils’ version sort algorithm, the following items have
special priority and sort earlier than all other characters (listed in
order);
1. The empty string
2. The string ‘‘.’’ (a single dot character, ASCII 46)
3. The string ‘‘..’’ (two dot characters)
4. Strings start with a dot (‘‘.’’) sort earlier than strings starting
with any other characters.
Example:
$ printf "%s\n" a "" b "." c ".." ".d20" ".d3" | sort -V
.
..
.d3
.d20
a
b
c
These priorities make perfect sense for ‘ls -v’: The special files
dot ‘‘.’’ and dot-dot ‘‘..’’ will be listed first, followed by any
hidden files (files starting with a dot), followed by non-hidden files.
For ‘sort -V’ these priorities might seem arbitrary. However,
because the sorting code is shared between the ‘ls’ and ‘sort’ program,
the ordering rules are the same.
Info Catalog
coreutils: Minus/Hyphen and Colon characters
coreutils: Differences from the official Debian Algorithm
coreutils: Special handling of file extensions