Sort order of files in "find" results

[Carlo Henrico_1]

If I do a:

find . -name "STATS*" -exec abc.sh {} \;

the files are returned in an order not expected. I expect them to be returned in an alphabetic order.

The STATS* files have a date eg:
STATS20050203.txt
STATS20050201.txt
STATS20050202.txt

It seems as if they are returned in a date/time last updated order instead of "alphabetic" order (i.e. date order for the purposes of the abc.sh script).

ls -l does return them in the expected order.

How do I rectify this?

Thanks

Carlo

[Muthukumar_5 · Accepted solution]

Yes.

Try as,

for file in `find . -name "STATS*" | sort`
do
./abc.sh $file
done

hth.

[harry d brown jr]

find . -name "STATS*" -exec abc.sh {} \; | sort

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Muthukumar_5]

You can try as,

find . -name "STATS*" -exec abc.sh {} \; | sort

first:
$PATH variable has to have . included to execute it with out full path name or ./

second:
If you are abc.sh is going executing sorted files then it will be a problem more.

hth.

[Muthukumar_5]

sorry. Prev. post says you can try as, But it is "you can not try as" brown's reply.

[harry d brown jr]

If you need the files sorted BEFORE you execute abc.sh FILENAME, then use this:

find . -name "STATS*" | sort | xargs -i ./abc.sh {}

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Rodney Hills]

Directories are files that contain a list of filenames and associated inode. The find command just processes the filenames in the order they happen to be in in the directory.

Example-
$ mkdir newdir
$ cd newdir
$ touch c b a
$ find . -print
.
./c
./b
./a
$ rm b
$ touch d
$ find . -print
.
./c
./d
./a

Notice the first find displayed the names in the order they were created. But when I deleted file "b" and created "d", it put "d" in the slot where "b" was.

The reason ls lists the files sorted by filename is because ls does an internal sort.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Gregory Fruth]

I don't believe "find" is guaranteed to
return its results in any particular
order, because the underlying directory
structure doesn't guarantee any particular
order, either. If you want the "find"
results to be in some order
(time/alpha/size/etc.) you MUST sort them
yourself, typically using "sort".