A friend of mine was looking for a file using Nautilus while logged in as root on a SLE server.\u00a0 He was looking for a particular file that started with a capital “S”, and simply could not seem to find it.\u00a0 He thought he was losing his mind, because he was certain it was there when logged in earlier (as his regular user).<\/p>\n
Ah-hah!\u00a0 Some of you have already solved this riddle…\u00a0 but do you know the underlying reasons why this is the case?\u00a0 I’ll explain how it applies to bash on Suse, but it’s pretty much the same for other shells (and can be made to be the same on other distros).<\/p>\n
You see, when you log in as regular user (meaning with a regular user profile) and do a file listing with Nautilus or The magic is actually done by the “ …which is set in So now it is all clear.\u00a0 You get to choose the order in which you want to see the files.\u00a0 But in the end, the standard behavior for the root user’s Nautilus or On a side note, as a bash user, you get a set of\u00a0 options for ls called \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ls<\/code>, you see the files listed in alphabetical order, regardless of case.\u00a0 When you are logged in as root, you see files listed in ASCII-like text order;\u00a0 meaning all uppercase letters completely precede the lowercase letters.\u00a0 It’s important to understand that these symptoms are not directly *caused* by Nautilus, ls<\/code>, or their options;\u00a0 in fact, these tools are simply responding to the order in which they see the files.<\/p>\nLANG<\/code>” (language) variable of the current user session.\u00a0 This is because for the root user, the LANG<\/code> value defaults to “POSIX<\/code>” (which honors the ASCII style listing), and for regular users it is set to “en_US.UTF-8<\/code>” (for English US, at least; obviously yours might be a different variant of UTF-8<\/code>), which is more human-style.\u00a0 Check it yourself with:<\/p>\necho $LANG<\/code><\/p>\n\/etc\/sysconfig\/language<\/code>.\u00a0 From that very file, I think the comment section explains it best:<\/p>\n# Local users will get RC_LANG as their default language, i.e. the
\n# environment variable $LANG . $LANG is the default of all $LC_*-variables,
\n# as long as $LC_ALL is not set, which overrides all $LC_-variables.
\n# Root uses this variable only if ROOT_USES_LANG is set to \"yes\".<\/code><\/p>\nls<\/code> listing results is probably the way most sysadmins prefer (for scripts, regex, and such), and the pretty alphabetical method is probably best for regular users (more like windows).<\/p>\nLS_OPTIONS<\/code> in \/etc\/bash.bashrc<\/code>.\u00a0 This file basically decides whether or not you are the root user, and if so, set the “-A<\/code>” option to show “Amost All” of the files (basically all except “.” and “..”). Just wanted to mention that in case you were wondering where all your so-called “hidden” files went, too…<\/p>\n