On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 3:23 PM Peng Yu <pengyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > I'd like to make sure the `find -printf '%P\n'` output of a directory > (i.e., only relative paths are printed) be consistent among different > runs as long as the file paths in the directory are the same. > > I can pass the `find` output to `sort`. Is it the best way to do so? Thanks.
With one tweak. Use "LC_ALL=C sort" rather than "sort" because file names are not text. File names aren't text because POSIX doesn't require a file's base name to be in the same character encoding as the base name of its parent. It also doesn't require the base names of two directory entries having the same parent directory to have the same encoding, either. In practice these do indeed differ, since quite often different users use different character encodings. This even crops up occasionally in OS installs (e.g. Debian, at one time). Therefore there can be no character encoding which will in general deal with any path name having more than one component, or any list of more than one path name. James.
