Request: Hexadecimal filename sorting for Nemo

[lvl20]

I have to deal with hundreds of files, which have have mixed text and hexadecimal numbers, as such:
IMF???.IMG

... where ??? is a left zero padded 3 digit base 16 number between 000 and 3ff.

This is quite annoying to handle with Nemo and with file open dialogs. Could support for these numbering systems be added to the sort functionality? Possibly as an optional toggle in case it annoys someone?

[Jopp-gh]

Some suggestions:

• check your camera's settings and define a new name scheme
• sort files in Nemo's list view (in base of their creation date), select multiple files, then rename using "bulky"
• use pix or digikam for digital asset management (pictures, movies, audio, fonts) like renaming, tagging, sorting, metadata management, etc

[lvl20]

I should have added more context.

• These are not images. They are files from a video game. Each file is actually an uncompressed archive, literally 10 subfiles concatenated together with a 4 byte per entry address header at the start of the file for navigation. Some of the subfiles contain event scripting for that field/scene, others pseudo-animation data done via palette switching, sound effects, lots of unknown data.
• Renaming them is feasible - I could convert the hexadecimal portions of each filename to base 10 with a bit of scripting.
• Sorting them by creation date isn't viable because these files were created from 1995 to 1997, and the order in which they were created (or last modified) is not their base 16 alphanumeric file naming order.

[Jopp-gh]

Hmm, this is a specific not common case, imo.

In your case I'd refrain from renaming file chunks, otherwise you could mess up the integrity of your whole game.

But this request is interesting.
Undoubtedly you could write some bash code to create a list to suit your needs, to process your data further. I guess sorting isn't your main goal, right?

[lvl20]

A python script is better for my purposes because I can give it to other people working with the game who have the same problem. I would make another script that reverses the change, and changing filenames doesn't change the contents of files so that's not really an issue. If it somehow were, I could hash the files, store those hashes in a text file, then compare them before and after each script is run to warn me.

The issue is entirely that the "file load" dialog looks like this in a hex editor:

Trying to find a specific file to load and inspect is nightmarish. It takes me 10 minutes sometimes.

Here are the first 3 sequential IMF files:
IMF000.IMG, IMF001.IMG, IMF002.IMG

I can't understand what the sorting rules are, so I must manually inspect every file name to make sure it's the one I want to load. I can avoid this somewhat by grabbing the files I want to work with and put them in their own directory, but if I have look up a specific room (an arbitrary filename, in other words) in the game to figure out how it implements a special type of shop, then it's back to hunting.

edit

Someone on Linux Questions dot org just informed me that it looks like Nemo uses some sort of "natural" or "intelligent" sort, rather than ASCII sort (or at least ASCII subset of whatever encoding I'm using). This would not be a problem in anything that sorts by the order of letters in the file encoding scheme, or at least it would be less of a problem because I can look up an encoding table.

[Jopp-gh]

You need to go mini steps: split name in prefix, body and suffix.
To find the right combo I'd filter by same suffix, then static prefix, read n head lines of the result and build a sorted list.
Important is to start coding, imo. It's better you start with little experiments to find the right patterns, than to want a final script or to search manually.

[cplittlfield]

So far as I know, there is no GUI setting to change the collating sequence in Nemo. There might be a way of altering the Nemo configuration, but that's an open question. By default, Nemo picks up the system locale settings, which are contained in ~/.xsessionrc. In the shell you can override the settings by prefacing your command with LC_ALL=C, which you may not like the results of any better, but it sorts in strict ASCII order. If you can select your file choice with a combination of ls and other tools, you could then run xviewer or whatever with that criterion. You might even try running LC_ALL=C nemo at the command line and see if that alters its behavior.

Alternatively, do you have any table of what the hex values mean? That is, do the digits tell you anything about the file contents? That might be another way to narrow down the choice of files, whether in Nemo or on the command line.