Nerd Food: Getting ls to behave

ls appears to be sorting rather weirdly of late (well, since quite a few Ubuntu releases), ignoring upper and lower case, e.g.:

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 00:12 cmake

-rw-r--r-- 1 marco marco 8708 2010-03-17 18:39 CMakeLists.txt

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 15:17 config

drwxr-xr-x 4 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 cpp

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 16:24 doc

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-12 01:39 glade

drwxr-xr-x 5 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 18:42 output

-rw-r--r-- 1 marco marco 1124 2010-03-17 16:26 README.TXT

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 scripts

drwxr-xr-x 3 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 sql

drwxr-xr-x 3 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 templates

This is utterly annoying. The main reason people use upper case filenames is precisely because they come up at the top of the listing. It appears the reason why is the locale, more precisely LC_COLLATE.

$ locale | grep LC_COLLATE

LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"

By changing it to C, it all behaves as expected:

$ export LC_COLLATE=C

$ ls

-rw-r--r-- 1 marco marco 8708 2010-03-17 18:39 CMakeLists.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 marco marco 1124 2010-03-17 16:26 README.TXT

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 00:12 cmake

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 15:17 config

drwxr-xr-x 4 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 cpp

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 16:24 doc

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-12 01:39 glade

drwxr-xr-x 5 marco marco 4096 2010-03-17 18:42 output

drwxr-xr-x 2 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 scripts

drwxr-xr-x 3 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 sql

drwxr-xr-x 3 marco marco 4096 2010-03-11 18:22 templates

Much better! To make it permanent, add it to your .bashrc.