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.