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What ascii character would sort before the dot character?

What ascii character would sort before the dot character?

  • In Midnight Commander, files beginning with dot (hidden files) are sorted first and this make browsing in home directory quite difficult. Is there a character that I can use that would be sorted before the dot? Note: I know that I can hide the hidden files with Alt+..

  • Answer:

    Midnight Commander just sort non alphabetic characters as they are ordered in the ASCII standard. Just have a look at http://www.asciitable.com/ and pick any character before the dot (number 46 decimal). As you see... the choice is narrow. Depending on the operating system you use, some characters are not usable. For Windows and Linux, you can just use a space, but this can be very missleading. And you'll need to use quotes around each such filenames when using the command line.

Sorin Sbarnea at Super User Visit the source

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Other answers

Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1. That said, you may prefer to use a UTF8 locale, which will ignore the dots: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 (substitute your locale information as appropriate).

geekosaur

In fact there are two answers: you can use $ and - (removed characters that are not accepted by major filesystems). Second: it is impossible in mc because mc will always display the dot first.

Sorin Sbarnea

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