Directory listing not fully sorted

I have the following directory listing on a Debian Linux system. However, one strange thing is that the file populate.sql does not seem to be sorted with the rest.

-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 10004 Jul 28 13:16 populate2.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 10244 Jul 28 13:16 populate3.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 10359 Jul 28 13:16 populate4.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 11618 Jul 28 13:16 populate5.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 11654 Jul 28 13:17 populate6.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 12198 Jul 30 16:20 populate7.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 12286 Aug 10 00:10 populate8.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 12331 Aug 19 08:48 populate9.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 12401 Aug 20 14:58 populatea.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 12460 Aug 22 01:09 populateb.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 12503 Aug 22 17:13 populatec.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 13341 Aug 23 23:23 populated.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 13414 Aug 27 23:01 populatee.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 16064 Aug 31 00:03 populatef.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 17529 Sep 16 15:38 populateg.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 19348 Sep 19 22:50 populateh.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 21033 Sep 27 20:46 populatei.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 21024 Sep 28 00:02 populatej.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 22505 Sep 28 22:55 populatek.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 23831 Oct  5 21:24 populatel.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 23665 Nov  2 22:16 populatem.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 23513 Nov  4 21:53 populaten.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 27191 Nov 19 14:55 populateo.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 30142 Nov 28 17:51 populatep.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 30853 Dec 10 14:49 populateq.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 33690 Dec 11 23:43 populater.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1  9945 Jul 28 13:16 populate.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 38696 Jan 16 22:27 populates.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 user1 user1 38696 Jan 16 22:27 populatet.sql

At first I thought it might be because of a hidden character or something, but I can’t think of a hidden character that would come between r and s. Also, if I type vim populate.sql into the command prompt it opens the correct file which is further evidence there isn’t a strange character there.

Any ideas why populate.sql is not being sorted correctly?

Answers:

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Method 1

LC_COLLATE with any Unicode-aware collation, e.g. en_US.UTF-8 results in a sort order that ignores punctuation. Consequently, populate.sql sorts as populatesql after populatersql but before populatessql.

If you want to see this behavior change, try running LC_COLLATE=C ls -al, and it will be sorted in C sorting order (by specific bytes without regard to any codepoints or locales).

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0