rubysortingpathname

Ordering in Ruby Pathname .children

It seems the order of the filesystem entities returned by Pathname's .children method is arbitrary or at least not alphabetical.

Is there a way to have these returned in alphabetical order via the file system rather than calling .sort on the returned array?

Solution

  • Pathname's children is actually doing:

    def children(with_directory=true)
  with_directory = false if @path == '.'
  result = []
  Dir.foreach(@path) {|e|
    next if e == '.' || e == '..'
    if with_directory
      result << self.class.new(File.join(@path, e))
    else
      result << self.class.new(e)
    end
  }
  result
end

    Dir.foreach calls the OS and iterates the directory passed in. There is no provision for telling the OS to sort by a particular order.

    "What is the "directory order" of files in a directory (used by ls -U)?" is probably of interest to you.