Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Alpha-sorted directory listings?
From: Bob Smith, Hammett & Edison, Inc. (bsmith@h-e.com)
Date: Mon Jul 20 1998 - 17:26:08 EDT
On Mon, Jul 20, 1998, 13:23:05 Chris Thorman wrote:
>>I believe Netatalk sorts according unix standards where all upper-case
>>charecter come before all lower-case charecters .
>
>Doesn't seem to be the case; I'm getting an order that seems to be
>creation-time based. This is using an ext2 file system on Linux Red Hat
>5.0.
>
>Anybody else using a utility such as PopupFolder which displays the
>unsorted output of a PBHGetCatInfo?
As I recall, afpd doesn't do any sorting at all, it uses opendir()/readdir()
and returns the entries to the Mac in the order they exist in the directory.
No Un*x filesystem that I know of does any sorting at the directory level
(certainly ext2 doesn't), so the order will be more or less by time of
creation for a fairly new directory, however one that has had lots of
deletions and creations will be in increasingly random order. This is
fundamentally different than an HFS volume (or HFS-based AppleShare server
volume) because HFS implicitly stores the volume catalog in alpha sequence.
To fix this the directory scan code in afpd would have to be re-written to
store and then sort the directory information, I'm sure it is possible but it
probably isn't trivial.
Hope this helps!
Bob Smith
Hammett & Edison, Inc.
bsmith@h-e.com
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