sorting - Bash Sort like Windows 'natural sort order'

Question

I've got a bunch of PDFs that I'm trying to append together, and I've got a program that, given a list of files, will append them to one PDF.

The issue I'm having is that piping the file names to sort does not produce the desired order. None of the flags of sort give me what I want either. I've got some examples below:

Desired sort order:

test1.pdf
test2.pdf
test10.pdf

Achieved sort order using sort:

test1.pdf
test10.pdf
test2.pdf

For more info on exactly what constitutes the sort order I desire, see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb759947.aspx

Answer 1

Assuming you're using GNU sort, use the-V option:

   -V, --version-sort
          natural sort of (version) numbers within text

For your input, it'd produce:

test1.pdf
test2.pdf
test10.pdf