sort or awk?

[Nik_1]

Hi,

Calling all awk gurus! I am trying to sort a group of files by date order... using the following:

ls -la |sort -r -k 6

This sort the list by field 6 (the month) but it sort it alphabetically... is there anyway to sort this using the calender format? so as this is reverse, I'm hoping for:

Dec
Dec
Mar
Jan
etc... etc...

thanks.
Nik

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell · Accepted solution]

Hi

Will ls -lrt not give you what you want?

Paula

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

NONE.

Use -t flag of ls


ls -t ... or ls -rt ( for reverse order)

[Deepak Extross]

Neither :-)
"ls -lt" or "ls -lrt", depending on whether you want ascending or descending order.

[Nik_1]

Complete moment of madness there! sorry!
of course, you're all correct... have 10 points each for taking the time to answer my question! :)

[Nik_1]

Hang on a second... it could be more complicated than I thought...
What I'm trying to do is a find command to find the 10 most recent documents within a directory (and all subs). So I'm using the find command with -mtime and then sending all output that it finds, to a temporary file.. which I would then like to sort by month (field 6) not alphabetically but by calender... any ideas again!? potential for even more points now! :)

[Justo Exposito]

Hi Nik,

Try this:
find . -type d -exec ls -lrt {} \;

Regards,

Justo.

[Justo Exposito]

Hi Again,

Or try this if you want only the first 10 occurrence:
for i in `find . -type d -print
do
ls -lrt $i | head -10
done

Regards,

Justo.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

If the temp file can contain all files, and it is not /huge/ (iow, it would also fit in memory), it is easy to write a perl script

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;

my @dir = (".");
my @files;

find (sub {
-M $_ < 0.9 and return; # Too new
-M _ > 6.4 and return; # Too old
push @files, $File::Find::name;
}, @dir);

my @sorted_by_date = sort { -M $a <=> -M $b } @files;

print "Newest 5: @sorted_by_date[0..4]\n";
print "Oldest 5: @sorted_by_date[-5..-1]\n";

[Nik_1]

thanks guys... but those sort each directory... what I am trying to achieve is an entire list of files within different directories that are given as just a list of files in date order (trying to avoid individual ls -ltr of each directory.)

[steven Burgess_2]

Hi

find . -type d -xdev | xargs ll -ltr > /tmp/file1

Steve

[harry d brown jr]

Nik,

Are you trying to say you want the MONTH's sorted in reverse, like this:

SEP
OCT
NOV
MAY
MAR
JUN
JUL
JAN
FEB
DEC
AUG
APR

which is what an APLHA sort will do??????????

Which I don't think you want. What you really need to do is look at procura's perl example and modify it for what you want.

live free or die
harry

[Nik_1]

Hi Harry,
No I'm trying to work out how to get them sorted like...

Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

in my perl script, '@dir' can be any list of sub-folders, like

@dir = ("/tmp", "/etc", "/usr/sbin");

or

@dir = qw( /tmp/blah /tmp/foo/ahhrg /stand /usr/etc );

[harry d brown jr]

Nik:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
# written by harry d brown jr
#
# get the "option"
#
$opts = $ARGV[0];
#
if ( ( $#ARGV < 0 ) || ( $opts !~ /-atime|-ctime|-mtime/ ) ) {
print "Usage : ./o [-atime|-ctime|-mtime] [dirpath ...]\n";
exit 1;
}
#
# get directories to list
#
$DIRS2list = "";
for ( $i=1 ; $i le $#ARGV ; $i++ ) {
$DIRS2list .= $ARGV[$i] . " ";
}
#
# find the files, and not we are only using real files, to use all
# remove the "-type f"
#
open(FILELIST,"find $DIRS2list -type f|");
#
$filemat="";
#
# a little trickery to get the optins and LS commands
#
$LSOPTS = "u c";
$OPTSTR = "amc";
$DATEIDX = index($OPTSTR,substr($opts,1,1));
$DATECHAR = substr($LSOPTS,$DATEIDX,1);
#
# read the file list from find
#
while () {
chop;
($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,$atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$
blocks) = stat $_;
$DATEFIELD[0] = $atime;
$DATEFIELD[1] = $mtime;
$DATEFIELD[2] = $ctime;
$date2use = $DATEFIELD[$DATEIDX];
push @filemat,$date2use . " " . $_;
}
#
# sort the array on the time the user choose
#
#
@newmat = sort { $b <=> $a } @filemat;
#
# spit the listing out
#
foreach $filestuff ( @newmat ) {
($filetime,$filename) = split(/ /,$filestuff);
print `ls -l$DATECHAR $filename`;
}
# end of script


You might have to change the PATH to perl, and the options are this:


./prog -atime /tmp /var/tmp /whatever

-atime = last access time
-mtime = last file change
-ctime = last INODE change

use a "." (period) for the current directory.


procura, what do ya think?

live free or die
harry

[SHABU KHAN]

Nik,

If you still want the find command to do what you are looking for, then here it is:

ls -lt `find . -mtime +10 -type f -print`

This will find all files older than 10 days from current date and will sort in the order that you need ...

Thanks,
Shabu

[SHABU KHAN]

Nik,

I forgot to mention one more thing ... there is a catch ... if this doesn't find any files older than 10 days then it would list everything in the current directory or from wherever you are executing it ...

-Shabu

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Nik:

Hi Nik:

'sort' will serve quite well for your purpose. You simply need to describe the sort key with the '-M' option to cause the order of the month names to be compared such that JAN < FEB < ... < DEC.

Have a look at the man pages for 'sort'.

Regards!

...JRF...