In terminal, I want to make a bunch of folders appear in a certain order. It isn't alphabetical, but in an unrelated order. When I do this:
mkdir this folder is going to be
The folders all show up correctly in Finder, but alphabetized. I have confirmed that the folder's view options are set to Sort By: None, Arrange By: None.
Is there a different way to accomplish this?
If you really want "no order" you will get unpredictable results. Seems like you want file creation date or file modification date (oldest first) order.
This command:
$mkdir this folder is going to be
is misleading, because you have no idea what algorithm 'mkdir' is using internally to create the folders (unless you read the source), so no idea what order is actually going to result, from the point of view of the filesystem (its not the order you expect).
To be clearer, you need to issue the command once per file
$ mkdir this
$ mkdir folder
$ mkdir is
$ mkdir going
$ mkdir to
$ mkdir be
then you can list in reverse modified-date order:
$ ls -tr
this folder is going to be
$ ls -ltr
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 user staff 68 6 Jan 20:41 this
drwxr-xr-x 2 user staff 68 6 Jan 20:41 folder
drwxr-xr-x 2 user staff 68 6 Jan 20:41 is
drwxr-xr-x 2 user staff 68 6 Jan 20:41 going
drwxr-xr-x 2 user staff 68 6 Jan 20:41 to
drwxr-xr-x 2 user staff 68 6 Jan 20:41 be
on the native mac filesystem hfs+ there is also a 'creation date' flag, which is probably what you want, but this is not very portable across other filesystems.
IN the finder, arrange by > date created or arrange by > none, view in list view, with 'date created' column showing, and click on it.