Rae The Doe Comic Strip 2025-04-24

That's why you give them names starting with 001, 002, etc.

That's just alphabetical sorting. There's other sorting styles that would put 11 after 2, but those aren't available everywhere.

Assuming that the leading number and period is part of the filename:

If the directory-browsing thing supports natural sorting of numbers, you can use that; this will detect numbers within the filename and sort by them. For example, I use emacs's dired to browse directories and play movies. It can modify the flags passed to ls, and ls supports natural sorting of numbers in filenames with the -v flag. Doing this in dired means C-u s v RET, and the directory will be displayed sorted numerically.
If the directory-browsing thing doesn't support that, rename to a "0"-padded format such that a lexicographic order has the same ordering as numeric order:
```
 $ for f in *; do
     n="$(printf %04d ${f%%.*})"
     mv "$f" "$(echo $f|sed s/^[0-9]*/$n/)"
 done 
```
That way,
```
 1. Episode_One.mp4
```
will become
```
 0001. Episode_One.mp4
```
and so forth, and so software that can only do lexicographic orderings is happy.

If the leading number and period isn't part of the filename, then we need to parse human-language strings.

$ npm install words-to-numbers

$ for f in *; do
    w="$(echo $f|sed -r "s/^Episode_([^.]*).mp4/\1/")"
    n=$(echo $w|node -e 'wn=require("words-to-numbers"); const l=require("readline").createInterface({input:process.stdin, output:process.stdout, terminal:false}); rl.on("line", l=> {console.log(wn.wordsToNumbers(l));})')
    nf=$(printf %04d $n)
    mv "$f" "$nf. $f"
done

That'll rename to the format mentioned above in option 2:

Episode_One.mp4

will become

0001. Episode_One.mp4

And lexicographic sorting will work.

You know what, I'll just manually rename the files
Wow is it really that simple? I wonder why not everybody does that! 🤣
- The first case is the most-likely for most people, and the simplest to do. Most directory browsers do support numeric sorting.
  
  In the second case, I provided a Perl program in another comment in the thread that provides a generic way to do this with one command for nearly all files of this sort.
  
  The third case, where human-language stuff needs to be parsed, true enough, doesn't just have a button to push.

So true. I recently learned there's a Python package for natural sorting, similar in other languages.

garbage in, garbage out

Someone's got wrong locale set

Sort by a field that isn't the file name.

Rae The Doe Comic Strip 2025-04-24 | Comics Kingdom