Sorting is a commonly needed operation in all kinds of programs. Luckily, for us perl programmers, perl provides a very simple yet extremely powerful mechanism to accomplish any sort you might think of. This article is about teaching the novice programmer how to sort lists of things, while showing to the more experienced folks certain techniques and ideas that could be new to them if they are migrating from a different language.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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