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From: pizzi@esacs.UUCP (Riccardo Pizzi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: SCO UNIX (3.2.2) 'ls' is broken... what a shame
Keywords: ls SCO shame
Message-ID: <41@esacs.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jan 91 15:17:38 GMT
Organization: Esa Software s.r.l. Rimini (FO), ITALY
Lines: 63

We installed recently the new SCO UNIX release, i.e. 3.2.2.
I read a *lot* of people on the net saying that this new release is
stable and is not buggy like 3.2.0 and 3.2.1.
However, my first login on the newly installed system showed a very nasty
bug in one of the most used commands, 'ls'.
I wonder how it is possible that such a bug was not caught on the OS test
phase, and therefore I think maybe it only shows under particular
circumstances.

Please, look at the output of the 'lc' command on my home directory:

AAA            house.c        mbox           remind22.5     sps.2
active.uunet   hv@uwasa.fi    mte215.zip.1   s.c            sps.3
alt.groups     hv@uwasa.fi.h  mte215.zip.2   sb.1           sucker
anonftp.sites  i2u.info.h     nws            sb.2           TTT
batchout.c     i2u.info.i     periodic       sb.3           T1500.uunet
casa           maild          prog           sb.5           uunet.games
ciuccia        maild.c        remind22.1     sb.6           uunet.unix
conq4          Makefila       remind22.2     sb.7           uunet.x
ftp-server.h   makefile       remind22.3     sig
gifhelp        Makefile       remind22.4     sps.1

In the ASCII character set, I have always thought the capital (upper case)
letters should come *before* the lower case letters, but this seems not true
for SCO...
If we look at the following files: maild.c, Makefile, makefile e Makefila,
we would expect to see the following:

	   Makefila
	   Makefile
	   maild.c
	   makefile

now, take a look and see how SCO sorted the files...
The first problem that comes to my mind is that the old habit of giving
important files an uppercase name (or capitalized, as you prefer) does not
work here... what a shame!
I thought the bug could depend on the internationalization stuff, but never
had the time to dig into it to debug the problem (I don't like SCO UNIX
at all, agreeing with most developers out there so I don't want to do it, too).

BTW: today I found that the numbers always come *after* all other letters:

total 106
drwxr-xr-x   2 bin      bin           32 Nov 19 13:22 backupfirst
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other          0 Dec 31 23:50 croutPCHa00232
drwxrwxr-x   2 400      other         32 Dec 12 14:44 dd
-rw-------   1 pizzi    mmdf       12288 Jan 02 16:16 Ex23616
-rw-------   1 nick     group       6144 Jan 02 16:16 Ex23751
drwxr-xr-x  20 bin      bin          320 Nov 19 13:22 ID
drwx------   3 sys      sys           48 Oct 24 18:22 init2
-rw-r--r--   1 pizzi    mmdf         112 Jan 02 15:48 posta23609
-rw-------   1 pizzi    mmdf       11264 Jan 02 16:16 Rx23616
-rw-------   1 nick     group      10240 Jan 02 16:16 Rx23751
-rw-r--r--   1 nick     group        551 Jan 02 16:06 sh237284
-rw-r--r--   1 nick     group        162 Jan 02 16:06 sh237285
-rw-r--r--   1 nick     group        184 Jan 02 16:06 sh237286
-rw-r--r--   1 pizzi    mmdf        2895 Jan 02 16:04 uffa
-rw-r--r--   1 pizzi    mmdf           5 Jan 02 16:16 1st_time

Anybody has a solution?

Riccardo