giving mouth-to-mouth to a dead horse (was Re: Dot files always first in directory?)

[Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge]

In article <2778 at buengc.BU.EDU>, bph at buengc (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
| >NO, its not save to assume that.
| >try "touch #abcd" then 'list' the directory.
| To beat this horse quite dead, any leading character that would sort before
| the period will place the filename before the . and .. in a directory
| listing.  The ascii characters that will do this are space, !, ", #, $, %,
| &, ', (, ), *, +, ,, and -.  I haven't tried it, but I bet you can get the
| nonprinting ascii characters to do it too.  There are 32 of those.

Nope (he says, donning the usual asbestos suit...),

the original requestor was using opendir/readdir.  These routines have
*NOTHING* to do with ASCII sorting order, but rather return the order
of files in the underlying directory.  The original statement
(paraphrased) was "Can I assume that . and .., having generally been
created first, can be safely skipped while scanning the directory *IN
DIRECTORY ORDER* without possibly fouling up?"

The answer, apparently (according to the half dozen responses arriving
here) is *no*.

Your response is the right answer to the *wrong question* -- the
question you answered was "can I get a filename that sorts before the
'.' and '..' entry if I say 'ls -a'?".

(Maybe if you try adding the filenames... no... nevermind... :-)

P.S. Note the yet-again updated sig.  BiiN just killed all contractors
and temps -- stay tuned for the dismantling :-)
--
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095===\
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