[NTLUG:Discuss] Undoing Windows Sytle ls foo

[kbrannen@gte.net]

Kenneth Loafman wrote:
> Just upgraded from RH 6.2 to 7.3.  All is well except I can't seem to 
> find which switches were installed that cause the oddball directory 
> listing.  I want (need) to have the old style UNIX directory listings 
> with the dot-foo stuff first, alphabetized with case-sensitivity, etc. 
> This new listing looks too much like the crap Windows users have to 
> contend with.

I had that problem too for awhile.  I was starting to get so bugged by it, I 
almost tracked down the source to ls just so I could compile it with debug 
symbols and find out why it was sorting that way.  Just about the that time, I 
did an upgrade (from Suse 7.3 to 8.0) and the problem went away.  I still 
don't know why it happened, but part of me is wondering if a "bad" version of 
glibc got into the distros for awhile (I've seen this on RH too), before a 
"bug" (or feature :-) got fixed.  There is no switch I can find in the help 
screen or in the man page that turns this on, and conversely, none to turn it 
off...hence my thought about a library bug.

That probably doesn't help you much, but maybe it will give you hope that it 
will probably get better with the next upgrade.

Kevin