I hope someone familiar with the way Linux processes files can enlighten
me on the following:
I recently replaced an old Windows 2000 server with a new machine
running CentOS 5.2. It uses Samba 3.2.7 to serve a network of Windows XP
clients.
We are a newspaper. We use Acrobat Distiller to batch-convert a folder
of single-page PostScript files (for print) to a multipage PDF file (for
electronic distribution).
Running on a workstation, Distiller watches the folder on a Samba share
and does the conversion, automatically creating bookmarks, indexes and
other information.
On the Windows server, Distiller processes the files by filename order:
M09010901A001C.ps
M09010901A002C.ps
M09010901A003C.ps
... and so on.
On the Linux server, Distiller processes the files in an order that
seems arbitrary, for example:
M09010901A021C.ps
M09010901A005C.ps
M09010901A015C.ps
... and so on.
The order Distiller uses is NOT related to the time stamp of the files.
I tried to copy the files to the watched folder one by one in the
correct order; the result is the same.
This creates the need to open the final PDF and reshuffle the pages by
hand, which is very time consuming and prone to error.
There is a workaround to this: use the runfilex script that comes with
Acrobat: it can contain a list of files to convert, in the order you
want. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable for us since the process
then takes about 40 minutes (irrespective of platform or filesystem),
instead of 3 or 4 minutes.
My question is: how is the order of files determined by Linux when a
particular order is not explicitly required by a program?
I noted the following:
I have 4 files in a folder: file1.ps, file2.ps, file3.ps, file4.ps. When
I order them by date, they appear in Windows Explorer in, say, the
following order: 3, 4, 1, 2
If I copy them to a new folder one by one in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, they
will still appear in the order 3, 4, 1, 2 when ordered by date. So, what
information is transported with the files that makes the Linux server
present them to the world in this order?
Does someone know a workaround to this situation or can someone point me
to information about file ordering with Linux? By the way, I am using
the EXT3 file system. I tried the same on a VFAT file system and the
result is the same. It seems to be a Linux thing, not a file system thing.
Thank you for your patience.
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