Currently trace-files have the following format:

trace.[IP-Address].[TIMESTAMP].[RND-String].[SEQ-NUMBER].xml

This means that they are not lexicographically ordered. So if you grep within a log directory (or use globs on bash or simply ls), the 10th file will show up before the 2nd file.

I would like to change this format so that all files that a process writes are in order. One very simple possible way of doing this would be to make the sequence number fixed width (so 1 would become 0000000001). I know that this might make the whole thing look a bit ugly.

My preferred solution would be the following: Instead of using the above trace name format we could use the following trace name format:

trace.[IP-Address].[TIMESTAMP].[RND-String].[WIDTH-OF-SEQ-NUMBER - 1].[SEQ-NUMBER].xml

I think it is safe to assume that we will never have a process that creates 9999999999 trace files. The trace files will look almost the same and they will be lexicographically ordered.