Re: [PATCH v2 5/8] builtins/source: parse the -i option

[Chet Ramey]

On 5/17/24 1:15 PM, Robert Elz wrote:

>    | If `nosort' means no sorting, there is no imposed ordering, and ascending
>    | and descending are meaningless.
>
> Sure, but directory order, and reverse directory order aren't (and that's
> just a difference between the order in which you create the list as each
> new dirent is read from the directory - does it go at the head or tail).

That's changing from one random order to another.

> But in any case, it apparently isn't documented, if +nosort and -nosort
> are to mean the same thing, then it should say so.  

OK, that's easy enough.


>    | I'll consider it. What name would you propose for it?
>
> Now that's the difficult question, I hate inventing names for
> things - perhaps "number" or "numeric" or "numname" or ...

I like `numeric'.


> All that matters is that it fall back to be "names" if the filenames are
> not numeric (or at least if they don't start with digits, so atoi()
> would just return 0), fully numeric names are the only ones that matter
> to me.

Sure, but what do you prefer to do when you have results with a mix of
numeric values and string values? Pre-scan the results before sorting?
Let the comparison function handle it?

>    | Because it's a complication that may or may not be worth implementing
>    | without some critical mass of people asking for it. Let's see how this
>    | goes first.
>
> The doc also doesn't indicate what happens when the sort method chosen
> produces equal answers - that can't happen for names, since the same name
> can't occur twice in the same directory, but for everything else that's
> in the list it can.   Does it then sort by name, by directory order, or
> just by whatever order the sort algorithm (qsort?) happens to leave them
> in when it is done?

Yes, it's unspecified.

> Actually, one more option that might be worth adding (as a sort type)
> might be "random" - giving different results every time the same pattern
> is expanded. 

I don't see this as worth the implementation cost.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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