commit abef2ef3771392e52e85714b1eea1de10851e5ef
parent aa42ae52f6d5fc32727ab4c8a9d8375f9247e7c8
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:50:50 +0200
blog post
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diff --git a/src/blog/2025-09-28-alphabetic-order/alphabetic-order.md b/src/blog/2025-09-28-alphabetic-order/alphabetic-order.md
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+# When I say "alphabetic order", I mean "alphabetic order"
+
+Last month I have been on a multi-day hike with my dad. Each of us took
+many pictures, and when we came back we put them all in a shared folder.
+We both have Android phones, and the naming scheme used for our pictures
+was the same: `IMG_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss` followed maybe by some other numbers
+and then a `.jpg`. Here `YYYY` stands for the year, `MM` for month and
+so on, so that sorting the pictures in alphabetic order is the same as
+sorting them by date.
+
+Or so I thought. Strangely, when I looked at the files from my dad's
+Windows PC, they were not sorted correctly: all the pictures took
+with my phone came first, followed by all the pictures took by him.
+I thought this was surely some weird Microsoft bug - after using
+Windows 11 at work for a while, I would not be surprised if you
+told me their file explorer can't figure out how to sort strings.
+
+But then I looked at the same files in a shared Google Drive folder,
+and again they were in the wrong order:
+
+
+
+As you can see, the picture taken at 5:54 (with my dad's phone) comes
+before the one taken at 9:20 (also with my dad's phone), but after the
+one taken at 12:11 (with my phone).
+
+Weird. Well, maybe Microsoft *and* Google got this wrong. But
+that seems unlikely.
+
+Indeed, KDE's Dolphin file manager does the same thing:
+
+
+
+I'll spare you the screenshots, but Gnome and both the file managers
+that I have on my phone also get the alphabetic order wrong.
+
+At this point I thought that maybe one of the two phones is using some
+weird alternative unicode character instead of the underscore `_`. Really,
+I could not see any other explanation. But nope, this is not it, because
+the good old `ls` sorts my files correctly:
+
+```
+$ ls -l
+
+total 218572
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 1866185 Aug 28 18:51 IMG_20250820_055436307.jpg
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 4749899 Aug 28 18:50 IMG_20250820_092016029_HDR.jpg
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 6201609 Aug 28 18:52 IMG_20250820_092440966_HDR.jpg
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 7694802 Aug 28 18:51 IMG_20250820_092832138_HDR.jpg
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 1536520 Aug 20 09:57 IMG_20250820_095716_607.jpg
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 1054553 Aug 20 10:38 IMG_20250820_103857_991.jpg
+-rw-r--r-- 1 seba seba 965353 Aug 20 10:39 IMG_20250820_103903_811.jpg
+(and so on)
+```
+
+This was consistent among the couple of Linux distros I use, as well
+as my OpenBSD server. On the one hand this is good: not *every* single
+piece of software fucks up something as basic as string sorting. On the
+other hand, this makes it harder to debug what the fuck is going on with
+all the other file managers.
+
+It took me more than a month to figure this one out. Tell me, which
+file do you think comes first in alphabetic order, `file-9.txt` or
+`file-10.txt`?
+
+Of course, the user who named those files probably wants `file-9.txt` to
+come before `file-10.txt`. But `1` is smaller than `9`, so `file-10.txt`
+should be first in alphabetic order. Everyone understands that, and
+soon people learn to put enough leading zeros if they want their files
+to stay sorted the way they like.
+
+Well, apparently all these operating systems have decided that no,
+users are too dumb and they cannot possibly understand what alphabetic
+order means. So when you ask them to sort your files alphabetically,
+they don't. Instead, they decide that if some piece of the file name is
+a number, the real numerical value must be used.
+
+I don't know when this became the norm, to be honest I have not used a
+normal graphical file manager in a long time.
+
+*I know you asked for the files to be sorted in alphabetic order,
+but you don't want `file-10.txt` to come before `file-9.txt`, do
+you? No, I know you don't. I am not even going to ask you, your
+mushy human brain is too small to comprehend the intricacies of
+such a question. I'll spare you the thinking.*
+
+So it turns out that my dad's phone wrote the milliseconds in the file
+name right after the seconds, while mine added an extra underscore to
+separate them from the seconds. Which in my mind it should not have
+mattered, because alphabetically they should still have been sorted
+correctly to the second. But with this "modern" interpretation of the
+alphabetic order, the files without the extra separator in the name had
+a much higher number, so they come last.
+
+Now that I know what the issue is, I can solve it by renaming the files
+with a consistent scheme. I have also found a setting to fix Dolphin's
+behavior, but it was very much buried into its many configuration
+options. And I would rather not have to change this setting in every
+application I use, assuming they even allow it.
+
+I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead of
+trying to read your mind.
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