Salix OS

Thanks. For now, I had: in ~/.profile, which of course affected my account only (the second one was necessary, as with only the first one, LC_COLLATE was being overridden by /etc/profile.d/lang.sh).

If I put it in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh, that will take effect system-wide, correct? Once I am satisfied with the locale, I may put it there. I'm always on the fence about whether to make changes take effect system-wide, or one user only, because whenever I need to sudo, I no longer have the same aliases, colours, locale, etc.

In the en_CA.utf8 locale that comes with the system, the collate section looks like this: which is nice and simple (but, "iso14651_t1" includes "iso14651_t1_common", which is more than 85,000 lines). So I'd like to learn about the rules of the LC_COLLATE section, as maybe there would be a simple way, as above, to include and then reorder?

Yes, editing lang.sh will apply the changes systemwide.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with locale details and collate options to be of use.

Solved, thanks to a post on StackExchange:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... 006#361006

This post suggests modifying /usr/share/i18n/locales/iso14651_t1_common (that system-wide 85,000+ line file I mentioned earlier) to change the line which defines period/dot ('.') from: to: in order to have the dot sort before upper- and lower-case letters.

Rather than modify that file, since I already had a custom locale file based on en_CA.utf8 (which I used to modify date formats, etc.) which contained this LC_COLLATE section: which places upper-case letters before lower-case letters, I simply added a line to place the period/dot before the upper-case-letters: resulting in the sort order I described in my previous post! This approach could probably be modified to create other sort orders as well. While it is still a brute-force approach, it doesn't involve changing any system-wide files, and only necessitates the creation of one custom locale file.