  Lexicographic depth first search (LexDFS) is a graph search protocol which
has already proved to be a powerful tool on cocomparability graphs.
Cocomparability graphs have been well studied by investigating their
complements (comparability graphs) and their corresponding posets. Recently
however LexDFS has led to a number of elegant polynomial and near linear time
algorithms on cocomparability graphs when used as a preprocessing step [2, 3,
11]. The nonlinear runtime of some of these results is a consequence of
complexity of this preprocessing step. We present the first linear time
algorithm to compute a LexDFS cocomparability ordering, therefore answering a
problem raised in [2] and helping achieve the first linear time algorithms for
the minimum path cover problem, and thus the Hamilton path problem, the maximum
independent set problem and the minimum clique cover for this graph family.
