Hi Kees,

Friday January 03 2014 23:24, you wrote to Ward Dossche:

 KE> Hello Ward!
 KE> 03 Jan 14 21:57, you wrote to Andrew Leary:
 WD>> There is no guarantee of any alphabetical order. Is there?
 KE>  It should be sorted by creation date.

should and is may vary ....
as Ward mentioned ... its a mixture of OS dependent directory listing
and the _find_next() low/level-i/o routine to find the next file.

With the explicit filemask  segment.*  the first found match counts
whatever real file it is ...
i.e. if an os sorts the filenames in an internal directory table, the files
came out in this order. If another OS sorts the files by creation date
(as in plain old DOS FAT environments) the filenames cames out by filewritten
date (this doesn't have to match with the filedate)
Newer OS'ses have an automated defrag routine running. Maybe this routine also
sorts the directory listing by whatever order, probably alphabetical filename
ordering ?!?  but this is speculative ...

The segment.* definition is no officialy supported workaround to pickup any
segment not following the strict extension-numbers order that is expected by
the strict find segment filename search routine built in makenl_ng for
"Generic File Name" definition of makenl
so in principle you can roll a dime which of the segments in case of
potentialy multiple filename mask matches makenl will select

If you know the raw filename ordering schema of your OS'ses directories
and also the current state of ordering schema (in case some maintenance tasks
reorders the files) you can manualy check the first filename that matches the
segment.* mask.

Its assumed, that you only have one segment in your working directory of
makenl that matches the segment.* filename mask, all other scenarios may ends
in a strange result

With the segment.* definition, you have to do some working directory
maintenance manualy, maybe by script or with an own program, so that only one
segment will be kept in the makenl working directory for processing.



 KE> Kees
 KE> (2:280/5003.4)

regards, uli   ;-)

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 * Origin: AMBROSIA - Frankfurt/Main - Germany (2:240/1120)