Sort file names (numbered) in dired

Question

When Dired sorts files by name, it sorts in alphabetical order. That's fine with letters; however, when the file names start with numbers, it would be better to sort in numerical value.

Example:

This is how dired sorts my files:

10 11 12 13 ... 1 21 22 23 ... 2 31

I want 1 2 3 4 … 9 10 11 …

Answer 1

Here's my config:

(setq dired-listing-switches "-laGh1v --group-directories-first")

The relevant part is -1v.

Answer 2

Besides @abo-abo answer, I just want to quote the documentation:

dired-listing-switches is a variable defined in `dired.el'. Its value is "-Al --si --time-style long-iso"

Documentation: Switches passed to ls for Dired. MUST contain the l option. May contain all other options that don't contradict -l; may contain even F, b, i and s. See also the variable dired-ls-F-marks-symlinks concerning the F switch. On systems such as MS-DOS and MS-Windows, which use ls emulation in Lisp, some of the ls switches are not supported; see the doc string of insert-directory in ls-lisp.el for more details.

Basically, you can customize the switches you want dired to use when calling ls

Answer 3

The given answers are better for this precise problem because they hook directly into the behavior of Dired. However for generality's sake I want to mention the sort-numeric-fields command, which is specifically for sorting numbers by magnitude rather than lexicographically.

(sort-numeric-fields FIELD BEG END)

Sort lines in region numerically by the ARGth field of each line. Fields are separated by whitespace and numbered from 1 up. Specified field must contain a number in each line of the region, which may begin with "0x" or "0" for hexadecimal and octal values. Otherwise, the number is interpreted according to sort-numeric-base. With a negative arg, sorts by the ARGth field counted from the right. Called from a program, there are three arguments: FIELD, BEG and END. BEG and END specify region to sort.