(coreutils.info)Details about version sort

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10.1.4 Details about version sort
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Version sorting handles the fact that file names frequently include
indices or version numbers.  Standard sorting usually does not produce
the order that one expects because comparisons are made on a
character-by-character basis.  Version sorting is especially useful when
browsing directories that contain many files with indices/version
numbers in their names:

     $ ls -1            $ ls -1v
     abc.zml-1.gz       abc.zml-1.gz
     abc.zml-12.gz      abc.zml-2.gz
     abc.zml-2.gz       abc.zml-12.gz

   Version-sorted strings are compared such that if VER1 and VER2 are
version numbers and PREFIX and SUFFIX (SUFFIX matching the regular
expression ‘(\.[A-Za-z~][A-Za-z0-9~]*)*’) are strings then VER1 < VER2
implies that the name composed of “PREFIX VER1 SUFFIX” sorts before
“PREFIX VER2 SUFFIX”.

   Note also that leading zeros of numeric parts are ignored:

     $ ls -1            $ ls -1v
     abc-1.007.tgz      abc-1.01a.tgz
     abc-1.012b.tgz     abc-1.007.tgz
     abc-1.01a.tgz      abc-1.012b.tgz

   This functionality is implemented using gnulib’s ‘filevercmp’
function, which has some caveats worth noting.

   • ‘LC_COLLATE’ is ignored, which means ‘ls -v’ and ‘sort -V’ will
     sort non-numeric prefixes as if the ‘LC_COLLATE’ locale category
     was set to ‘C’.
   • Some suffixes will not be matched by the regular expression
     mentioned above.  Consequently these examples may not sort as you
     expect:

          abc-1.2.3.4.7z
          abc-1.2.3.7z

          abc-1.2.3.4.x86_64.rpm
          abc-1.2.3.x86_64.rpm